Mexico: A Novel Part 34

Shallcross did not propose to have his young wife answer for him: "I was there, as you were, Colonel Clay. We had great regard for your performance that day. I heard General Grant say so."

"Regard for me? Did he have no regard for his own troops? That he left them dying out there in the blazing heat?"

Aware that this line of interrogation must end in verbal brawling, Captain Shallcross said: "Colonel, I am honored to have a wonderful woman like your daughter for my wife. And had you been available at the time, I would have come to you as one man of honor to another to ask for her hand. I pray that you will grant it now." Extending his hand, he moved slightly toward Clay.

"For an agonizing moment," reported the ex-Confederate who had arranged this meeting, "the two men looked at each other, Shallcross almost pleading, Clay with growing bitterness, at the end of which he said darkly: T must leave this contaminated house, and I shall never in this life see you again, Grace.' With that he stamped from the room."

Before he left Richmond, Clay went to a notary and signed a legal paper giving t.i.tle to the two thousand acres of the former Newfields Plantation east of Cold Harbor to his daughter, Grace Clay, born on that site in 1850. After filing this with the registrar of such papers and asking that officer to advise her after he had gone, he returned to his lonely room, where he found awaiting him a letter that threw his plans into disarray: My Dear Col. Clay, I have heard through the Brackenridges of Richmond that in your despair over the death of your wife and the loss of your home you propose leaving the country. Surely, anyone who realizes the crus.h.i.+ng losses you have suffered will understand your decision, and those like me know how you, more than most men, centered the better portion of your life upon the joys you knew with Zephania, your unequaled wife.

But, Jubal, I must remind you that there is a higher duty, and I beg of you to reconsider. Do not leave our homeland. It sorely needs you now. You are an engineer and command the skills we require for the rebuilding of our ravaged lands. There is so much work to be done that if we all labored 'til midnight for the rest of our lives we should barely accomplish a beginning. You above all are needed.

Therefore I implore you, and if I were still your general I would command you, to stay at home and commit yourself to the work at hand. If you plead, "I spent four years fighting the North, must I now help them rebuild what they destroyed?" I can only advise you that the wisdom of the Almighty oftentimes commands a man to do exactly the opposite of what he did ten weeks before, and if he defends his honor there will be no dishonor in obeying the dictates of One mightier than himself. I implore you to stay and work, for I am convinced that it is G.o.d's work we do.

But I am mindful of the oppression one suffers when one must live where a particular tragedy has overtaken him, so I want you to leave Cold Harbor and come to Lexington, where our faculty sorely needs your engineering and mathematical skills. You will find a new life instructing our young men whose duty it will be to rebuild the South, and I shall rejoice in having with me once more that, das.h.i.+ng, reliable Colonel Clay.

Yours quietly Robert E. Lee Reading the letter three times in his hunger to hear once more his commander's grave voice, he satisfied himself that Lee was offering him a teaching job at long-established Was.h.i.+ngton College, a school of good reputation, and the idea of working with Lee again was so exciting that any thought of sleep was ridiculous. Throwing a jacket over his shoulders, he walked out into the streets of Richmond, the city he had fought so diligently to protect, and the idea of separating himself from the gallant struggle brought tears to his eyes. He visualized Lee as the one man who had gone through four years at West Point without picking up a single demerit-Jubal Early had had nigh two hundred every year-Lee as the bright-eyed captain in Mexico, and, finally, Lee in defeat. It would not be easy to disa.s.sociate himself from such a man.

But suddenly the menacing image of Ulysses Grant took possession of his mind, and as it crowded out the gentle memories of Lee he cried aloud: "I cannot live in the same country with that man!" He ran to a friend's house, asked to purchase a horse, which was given him free, and as the sun appeared he rode quietly out of Richmond, still legally a fugitive and aware that never in this life would he again see his beloved city, or his revered commander, or his daughter.

Chapter 16.

AMERICAN ANCESTORS: IN MEXICO.

WHEN MY GRANDFATHER landed at Veracruz in late 1866 and climbed the familiar road he had marched nineteen years earlier with General Scott as they fought their way to Mexico City, he antic.i.p.ated no difficulty in locating his friend General Early: "Stands to reason. If he's still in that big white hat with the turkey feather and that long white coat, everyone will know where he is." Using his adequate Spanish, he asked a watchman: "Where might I find American soldiers who came down here after our war?" and the man pointed: "That little church. Many Americans drink there all day."

When he entered the courtyard of the church, set off by a high adobe wall, he found the Confederates, and one look at the motley crew a.s.sured him that he had joined the losers. They were an unkempt lot, unshaven, unwashed, some of their clothes in tatters, but intermixed with that type were a few men of obvious breeding, men who could not tolerate living in a nation governed by men like Butcher Grant. Clay naturally gravitated toward those of his own kind but was prevented from joining them by the others, who showered him with questions: "What battles did you see? What generals did you march with? Did you have to leave America?" Some rough types not only asked questions, they also demanded answers, and in their eagerness for news of home he detected loneliness and the fear that they might never again see their homeland.

He had to answer them: "I'm a Virginia man, the Yankees burned my plantation, killed my wife and sons. I'm like you. I could never live there with men like Grant in charge." The men felt empathy for Clay because all of them were without jobs and some had no money at all. "How do you expect to live, Reb?"

"I'm looking for a friend. When I left him in Cuba, he told me to meet him here. He'd have something."

"Maybe we've seen him. What's he like?" and when Jubal mentioned General Early, the crowd broke into derisive joking: "Old Jube, got his a.s.s kicked at Winchester, didn't he? When he come here he talked big, cursed Grant, swore he'd never go back, Mexico was his home now."

A wry-faced man from Tennessee with only one arm broke in: "Cut quite a figure with that big white hat and turkey feather, but after three months he told us: 'No sane man could live in this madhouse. They beg this fellow to come over from Europe and be their emperor, and he done a good job, they tell me. But now they want to get rid of him.' "

"General Early, what happened to him?"

"Hightailed it off to Canada. Said it was a decent country a man could respect."

"Did he have any money?" Clay asked, and one of the men said: "His brother, back in the States-he sends him some."

During the few days he was in the capital Clay learned of more than a hundred Confederates who were determined to make Mexico their home, and many of them were unlike the disgruntled drifters in the churchyard. These others had found work. Some had brought considerable sums of money with them or had access to it through relatives back home, and Clay suspected that such men were going to build a good life for themselves, especially if they were able to get hold of property.

One such man from Georgia told him: "Mexicans hate the North just as much as we do. They welcome us Confederate brothers. If we try to fit in, they accept us." With a smile he added: "And they understand our att.i.tude toward our slaves. Their Indians are about the same but they use different words."

At the end of numerous similar discussions my grandfather reached two conclusions, which he often discussed with my father: "I saw that Mexico welcomed us only if we had money or a job, and I saw that neither was available in Mexico City. With that insight I headed for Toledo, where I hoped the rich Palafoxes might remember me."

They did. When three Palafox men who had attended that memorable dinner back in 1847 came to talk with Clay at the House of Tile, he could see they were heavier about the middle and grayer of hair, for that had been more than nineteen years ago, and he thought: They, of course, remember me as little more than a boy, and now I'm a battle veteran and a fugitive with lines in my face.

Don Alipio threw his bearlike arms about my grandfather and cried: "I could see when he was here before that he was a Toledo man, and that one day he'd be back. Well, here you are, and now what?"

They did not waste time with Jubal. The brother who managed the family's money said blundy: "Yes, nineteen years and we still don't have a decent manager at the Mineral. Senor Clay, destiny has brought you back to us. Can you ride out to the mine with us tomorrow? We seek your counsel." When the four men inspected the shaft-much deeper now but still operated by little Indian women climbing up those incredible stairs-and the smelter and the adobe warehouses, Jubal said: "It's obvious what ought to be done. You haven't even built the stone rim around the mouth of the shaft," and they said: "We talked about it, but our managers never seemed to understand."

Jubal, an honest man, one of the most incorruptible of that tormented period, could not misrepresent himself to the Palafoxes: "I have no plantation any longer, no wife, no children, no country." He paused, laughed and then concluded: "And d.a.m.ned little money. I need a job and I have a powerful feeling about this mine. Often during the war, and later, I thought of those caverns of silver."

A deal favorable to both sides was arranged that first morning after his arrival in Toledo, but he had barely started the innovations that would preserve this as one of the premier mines of the world when he was diverted by the last thing on earth he needed, another war. One morning Don Alipio came galloping out to the Mineral: "ClayI You must come with us. We may need your skills." On the hurried ride back to town the fifty-eight-year-old man said with the eagerness of a nineteen-year-old: "Queretaro has sent an urgent message. They need all the troops we have. The d.a.m.ned Indians are threatening to shoot the emperor, and we mustn't let that happen."

At the churchyard in Mexico City the Confederate exiles had mentioned an emperor, but Jubal had not been listening: "Has the emperor done a bad job?"

"A splendid one. Exactly what our side wanted when we asked for him."

This sounded so improbable that Jubal asked: "I don't understand," and Don Alipio stared at him in disbelief to think that a learned man from the next country had not even been aware of the tremendous change that had occurred in next-door Mexico: "Didn't you hear? The liberals were making such a mess of this country after you and General Scott left that some of us, men like my brothers and me, from all over Mexico, sent a delegation to the emperor of France--I was a member-- and we asked him to find a young prince of good character to come to Mexico as our impartial emperor. He made a handsome choice, Maximilian, royal house of Austria. I was on the committee of three who went to Vienna to offer him the crown. He took it and he and his Empress Carlota, the Belgian princess, have given our country just what it needed, stability."

Clay's mentor wished to explain further but apparently decided that no norteamericano could ever understand Mexican politics, for he shrugged and concluded: "Now they want to shoot him, the best man we ever had."

In Toledo he found more than a hundred militiamen gathered before the cathedral in the plaza, including five other members of the Palafox family, all mounted on st.u.r.dy horses. Since Queretaro, known as Jhe western protector of that capital, lay some seventy miles east of Toledo, the informal expeditionary force would require at least two days to reach their target, so a hastily put-together line of mules and their Indian drivers had been converted into a quasi-military train that would bring along tents and food and extra ammunition. Jubal, finding himself by accident part of a military exercise, thought, General Early would never do it this way, on the spur of the moment, but before he could protest to anyone, the Toledo force rode out to rescue their emperor.

The railroad, which had probed into many corners of Mexico, built with English and French money, had not yet reached Toledo, so the dirt road east was maintained in fairly good condition. But even so, by the end of the first long day, Jubal was exhausted, though the Palafox men appeared to be in top condition. As dusk fell, Clay was initiated into a long-established custom of the Mexican military unit. When the troops began to bivouac, a score of peasant women mysteriously emerged with clay pots and a collection of sticks, and before long the preparation of a hot meal of beans, tortillas and shreds of spicy meat was under way. Some of the women had come all the way from Toledo on donkeys, others had joined as the troops rode through their villages; they were the soldaderas, the hangers-on without which no Mexican army could function.

The Palafox expedition, as it was being called, approached the western outskirts of Querotaro on the afternoon of 18 June 1867, but there they were halted by a contingent of heavily armed Indians commanded by an officious white colonel from the southern city of Oaxaca who ordered the invaders to halt. When Don Alipio reined in his horse, the colonel warned him: "No armed troops allowed in the city tomorrow."

"Whose orders?"

"Benito Juarez."

Don Alipio did not spit at the mention of the hated name, but Clay could see that he clearly wanted to. "Are you from Oaxaca?" and when the colonel nodded, Alipio grunted: "I thought so. They're really going to shoot the emperor?"

"The court-martial has condemned him. For the welfare of Mexico."

"Must we remain outside the city?"

"You must."

The Palafox expedition thus came to a halt. But the idea that a decent man like the Austrian archduke, who had labored so diligently to ingratiate himself with the Mexican people, should be executed by a gang of Indians from Oaxaca was so offensive that Don Alipio, who felt responsible for Maximilian, having persuaded the young man to accept the imperial crown, suggested to Clay: "Are you willing to slip through the lines as a private citizen with no weapons?"

"Of course, but for what purpose?"

"To see what's happening."

"What could we do about whatever we do see?"

Don Alipio looked at him as if he were an imbecile: "Do! We give a grave man consolation-that we were there in his moment of agony. Come!" The two men, grabbing a handful of tortillas and leaving their big guns behind, left the guarded highway, slipped along the darkened edge of town, watched for pickets and slipped into the sleeping city. Working their way to the central area, they remained inconspicuous until Don Alipio found a way to accost a soldier without arousing suspicion: "Where will it happen?"

"They say they're bringing him to that wall."

"Are you one of the firing squad?"

'They never tell us." Then suspiciously: "Is this one a norteamericano?"

"Came here after the war up there. Citizen of Mexico now."

"Bad war?" the sentry asked, and when Jubal nodded, the man said: 'They're all bad."

They slept that night on the steps of a Queretaro church, and well before dawn they became aware of activity within buildings nearby. A troop of soldiers, perhaps fifty, marched out and took positions around a large square, not the central plaza, and with their rifles parallel to the ground they began pus.h.i.+ng anyone who had come to see the execution well back of where the shooting would occur.

When the sun was up, officials of various types scurried about the plaza exchanging a.s.surances that all was moving ahead as planned, and three times the group with which Don Alipio and Jubal stood was pushed farther back until the don asked a soldier: "Where can we stand without being moved here and there?" and the young man, a.s.sessing Alipio as an important figure, took him to a place cordoned off from the general public. There they waited, and when the June sun was high, so many people started running about at once that Don Alipio whispered: "Now."

From a nearby barracks a troop of a dozen soldiers, neatly uniformed, marched out with long rifles and took a parade-rest posture facing a wall constructed of big stones fitted together by artistic masons in years past. With the arrival of the firing squad, Jubal realized that an execution was really going to occur, and he asked Don Alipio "Why?" The disheartened man deferred to a nearby newspaperman, who was eager to explain: "The ones who brought the young prince here did a good thing. All the European nations supported the plan, which would bring order to Mexico, but in the United States there was always suspicion. You're norteamericano, yes?" When Clay nodded, the man said: "Monroe Doctrine, yes? Doesn't it say no European interference in the New World? Well, when Maximilian arrived, you were too busy with your own war to worry about ours, but once peace came-the North won, didn't it?" This Clay ignored. "When you had time to look south you saw Europe meddling in Mexican affairs and you said: 'This has got to stop!' and once you said that, all the kings in Europe grew afraid. They stopped supporting Maximilian. Result? That firing squad over there."

While the squad waited, some of them white-faced and nervous, people began emerging from what had been the emperor's prison, and they too took positions facing the wall. Finally an officer of some high rank appeared, and he stood close to the file of riflemen. Then came a priest, two soldiers and between them the tall, handsome Austrian whose rule over a nation about which he had known nothing had lasted only three years. Thirty-five years old, he was a striking man who looked imperial-slim, haughty in manner, composed and walking with a steady step and an almost defiant mien. Somewhere in the crowd a voice cried "Long live the emperor," and Jubal, realizing that Don Alipio wanted to echo it, grasped Palafox sternly by the arm and the older man remained silent.

An officer, moving the priest aside, offered Maximilian the customary blindfold but it was rejected. Staring straight ahead as if he wished to see the bullets leaping at him, he stood in sunlight and watched the commanding officer raise his sword, cry out the order, then lower his sword as his men fired their dreadful volley. Many of the bullets must have struck the emperor, for he fell instantly, bravely, and without a cry. The ridiculous adventure of Emperor Napoleon III of France and his fellow European monarchs had ended in tragedy.

As the Palafox group rode back to Toledo, depressed and angry at the way Benito Judrez, Maximilian's Indian opponent, had handled the affair, Jubal thought, We Americans are as responsible for his death as the Mexicans, but he did not voice this opinion. However, when they camped out the first night and the soldaderas moved in with their dishes, Don Alipio said thoughtfully: "The norteamericanos could have saved him, if they had wanted to. But they had other problems," and now Jubal could speak: "With men like Grant in control they'll never be able to do the right thing up there."

During the first half year that Jubal worked at the Mineral, he applied himself so diligendy to the task of bringing the operation into modern times that he rarely went into Toledo in the evenings. He ordered machinery from Scotiand, new devices for smelting ore from Sweden, and practical goods from the new industries in the northern United States. He did the last with repugnance, but had to admit that the prices were too attractive to be ignored. One of his accomplishments that gave him the greatest pleasure, however, was the construction of a neat circular wall twenty-two feet in diameter and four feet high enclosing the upper outlet of the shaft, but with a vast hole in the middle to allow the Indian women to descend into the mine and then to climb up with their baskets of ore. No way had yet been devised for doing this with machinery, but whenever Jubal caught sight of the women being used like pack animals he felt frustrated. "Why can't the men do that work?" he asked repeatedly and was never satisfied with the answer: "Because in Indian life, time out of mind, women do the hard work like tilling the maize and hauling the ore, while men do the work that requires thinking, like hunting animals, fis.h.i.+ng, fighting the enemy and, in the mines, working at the face and chopping out the ore in the proper way."

But one fundamental practice at the Mineral he did change. In the old days, it was only after three or four women had fallen to their death because of some faulty stone in the stairs that that step had been repaired. Now with Jubal making the descent and ascent several times each week, and inspecting each step as he climbed, he saw that the problem had two parts: either the riser was too high, making the downward step dangerous, or the tread was too narrow or lacking a corner, making the foot slip off. By correcting these errors before they could imperil the women, he saved lives.

One day while he was working with the stonecutter, a solitary Indian woman came up the steps and had to pause until the workman finished, and for the first time there in the semidarkness with the great stone-lined hole reaching downward, Jubal spoke with an individual Indian basket carrier. To his surprise she was not reticent, and in response to his interrogations revealed that she was nineteen, born to parents from a village not far from Toledo, baptized by priests in that area and sent by them to the mines as was traditional for young women of that village. She had worked in the shaft climbing up and down with her basket since the age of fourteen and expected to continue till thirty-five or a few years longer and then either to return to the village or to take a job in one of the caverns doing the jobs that centered in those s.p.a.cious areas.

"Why do you stop at age thirty-five?" Jubal asked, and the young woman had no explanation, but the mason working on the faulty tread interrupted: 'Their legs. They can't climb anymore. Well, they can climb, but not with baskets." He grinned at the woman and said: "I couldn't climb them either, with that loud of ore," and when Jubal tested the weight he said: "Me neither."

The woman said she had an Indian name, which Jubal did not understand, but also a baptismal name given her by the priest: "They said I was Maria de la Caridad. We're always Maria and another name to make sure the Virgin Mother looks aAer us." Her name meant Charity, and by popular custom she was known simply as Caridad. As she repeated the name Kartz-thath she gave it such a sweet, melodious sound that Jubal looked for the first time at her as another human being, a person like his dead wife, Zephania, who had given her shortened name, Zeph, that same musical lilt, and in that moment of recognition the basket carrier became not a slave sentenced to this life of toil by her Church and her government but an individual person with^a character, aspirations and a soul.

In later conversations with Caridad, Clay learned that her ancestor many generations back had been an important Altomec woman named Lady Gray Eyes, who had destroyed the terrible ancient G.o.ds and paved the way for Christianity, but Caridad wondered if the new religion was in any significant way better than the old: "It was the priests who discovered the mine and who dug this hole and put us to work for them." But when Jubal made inquiries about that, he learned that it was not Antonio, the first Palafox and the priest, who had done these things, but his brother Timoteo, who had been a kind of businessman and the operator of the mine in its earliest stages. And when he asked about this mystical Lady Gray Eyes, the Palafox men said: "No myth there. She was very real, and she did lead her people away from the hideous old G.o.ds and to Christianity. She had a beautiful daughter-in-law, Xochiti, mother of the amazing Indian woman called Stranger. That one married the first Palafox, so all of us dark ones are her descendants; the light-skinned ones come from the brother who married a Spanish lady, and kept doing it-I mean his descendants married Spaniards, too."

Why, Jubal wondered, did the Palafox line of Lady Gray Eyes' children now live in rural palaces while Caridad's slaved in the mines? Realizing that he lacked enough background to sort out a complicated story, he paid no more attention to it, but something happened in the mine that showed Caridad was an unusual Indian woman and perhaps just as proud as the Palafox men, to whom she was, presumably, distandy related. One day when he was working in one of the deepest caverns where the donkeys were kept, a group of Indian men were trying to fix an intricate network of ropes around a donkey so they could lower it to the newly excavated cavern below. They were having such difficulties with the obstinate beast that the foreman, one Joshua with a big voice, yelled at Caridad, who was nearby: "Don't just stand there like a fool. Help swing that rope." When she tried to pa.s.s it under the beast's belly, the donkey kicked, striking not Caridad but Joshua, who responded by knocking Caridad away from the operation and abusing her both physically and verbally. This Jubal could not tolerate, so he moved Caridad aside, told her not to worry, and himself fixed the sling under the animal and helped Joshua lower it to the next level.

Thus occupied, he did not notice the effect of Joshua's attack on Caridad, but when he finished the drop he chanced to look at her, and her face was many shades darker than before and she was biting her lower lip so hard that flecks of blood showed. Judging it prudent not to involve himself in Indian problems, he climbed up the stairs that now showed no danger spots, and by the time he was back at the smelter he had dismissed the incident altogether.

However, a few days later Indian women came to his office screaming: "Senor, Joshua fall down the shaft. Dead." Descending the stairs rapidly, he reached the cavern that housed the donkeys to find the dark place in turmoil. In the first moments of his investigation he learned that Caridad and others had been working to affix the sling to another donkey when Joshua had fallen backward and down the dark shaft. A woman named Maria de la Concepcion whispered: "Don Jubal, he was no good," and when he queried the men in the lower cavern one said: "I saw him fall, and he cried 'Caridad,' " but this informant also said that Joshua was no good, and he had not told the other men of the foreman's last word.

Jubal decided that Caridad had pretty surely taken revenge on Joshua, and he concluded further that it was not preposterous to think that this determined little basket carrier might be descended from some strong-minded woman who had defied and destroyed the unacceptable ancient G.o.ds.

Clay was pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation from the Palafox men to what became almost a recapitulation of that memorable family dinner in 1847, when the owners of the Mineral first broached the possibility of Clay's taking over the management of their mine. The same three couples were guests, and after drinks on the veranda overlooking the pyramid and congratulating Jubal on his accomplishments in improving the appearance and profitability of the Mineral, Don Alipio's wife said as darkness fell: "Alipio, ask the servants to light the flares," and brands soaked in oil were lit along the high wall that enclosed the gardens protecting the house. In this congenial ambience, with birds bidding the world good night, the group pa.s.sed the hours from seven through eleven discussing the death of Emperor Maximilian and the deplorable consequences for his widow, the Belgian princess.

"I loved her musical name," one of the women said, and in a gentle singsong she recited: "Marie Charlotte Amelie Augustine Victoire Clementine Leopoldine."

"Did she have no last name?" another woman asked, and the first said: "Seven is enough."

"But you didn't say what happened to her," and the doleful answer came: 'Tragedy overwhelmed her. She lost her mind, they say."

"Did they shoot her, too?"

"No, Juarez wasn't cruel enough for that. She's to go into exile, I believe-a sad misadventure, but we'll survive, Mexico always does."

At eleven the party moved inside to the s.p.a.cious dining room with its heavy oak chairs and silent Indian waiters, but before anyone was seated, Senora Palafox announced: "We have late arrivals," and through the wide doorway came a most handsome couple, both in their late twenties, the man in a gold-and-blue uniform, the woman in an ingeniously decorated white dress whose minute st.i.tching in light brown and gold made it almost s.h.i.+mmer in the flickering light. "This is our son-in-law Major Echeverria and his wife, our daughter, Alicia." Turning to Clay, the mother said: "I think you met our daughter when you were here before," but Clay was speechless, because just then a maid brought into the room a little girl of seven or eight dressed in the same exquisite China Poblana costume her mother had worn in 1847. As Jubal looked at the child the years pa.s.sed, the war vanished, the terrible losses he had sustained were obliterated, and he was again twenty-four with the stunning victories of General Scott less than three months past.

The protracted dinner, eleven till half past one, was for Clay p mixture of delight and torment, for although he was glad to see Alicia so radiant and happy as a wife and mother, he was distraught to think that a child who had impressed him so indelibly twenty years earlier, and who had lived in his memory ever since as that adorable child in her China Poblana, had graduated into a world from which he was forever barred.

As the amiable chatter swirled about him he wondered: Why am I so fascinated by her? Could it be that she represents all I lost in the fire? Is she Zephania reborn? But he had scarcely phrased the possibility than he dismissed it. No, d.a.m.n it. It's Alicia herself. My G.o.d, how lovely she is! Then he almost broke into laughter at himself for his fanciful daydreaming. It's that d.a.m.ned dress. How that Chinese girl must have agitated the minds of Mexico. How she still agitates me.

His eyes kept focusing on the child, and her mother, noticing this, said rather boldly: "You seem to be fascinated . With my daughter's dress. Do you recognize it as one I wore here years ago?"

"I had hoped it was," he replied, and was about to explain why when Alicia said: "It was my grandmother's. It survived four generations."

Now he found himself gazing furtively at Alicia, and he saw that the promise of unusual beauty she had shown as a child had become reality. Not only did she have exceptional physical beauty but she seemed to have almost a spiritual force. Moreover, she talked sense: "Poor, doomed Carlota, she should have known their irresponsible adventure could come to no good end. No outsider could ever rule Mexico because it's doubtful he could understand us-certainly not an Austrian."

"She was Belgian," Senora Palafox corrected and her daughter said: "I was thinking of Maximilian. He should never have brought a creature like that to this savage land."

Alicia's use of the word "savage" caused her uncles and her father to protest, but she defended her position with spirit: "I see it so. The horror of that pyramid out there. Our greatgrandfather Timoteo branding all the Indians on the cheek. What things that infamous Cortos did. And the imbecilities of Santa Anna, eleven different presidents in thirteen years. Let me tell you, we're a doomed land."

Her father said: "Much as I despise Juarez, I think he might bring stability to this country. At least let us pray that he does," and on that hopeful note the dinner ended. And the Palafox men united in telling Clay: "You've exceeded our expectations. Now if we can only get the railroad to come our way, we'll be protected," and Jubal said: 'That's up to you, gentiemen. You know the people in control."

When time came to bid the Palafoxes good night and ride back to the Mineral, he said good-bye to Major Echeverria, shaking his hand. When he came to Alicia he bowed, afraid to touch her, but she extended her hand and took his: "We're so glad you came," and he could say nothing. Alicia's daughter in her China Poblana curtsied and said in a piping voice: "We're glad to see you, brave americano," and the group applauded.

In the following days Clay was tormented by the vision of Alicia Echeverria, who reminded him of all he had lost in Virginia: his wife, his home, his way of life and the companions.h.i.+p of his children. At night he slept poorly and in the daytime found litde joy in performing the very tasks that the previous week had given him such a feeling of satisfaction. He kept thinking alternately of Senora Echeverria and her eight-year-old daughter, and the child merged into the little Alicia he had seen twenty years before. It was perplexing, but one fact rose constantiy before him: Alicia, this vision of perfection, was married to someone else and would forever be unattainable. Yet her presence remained with him, and goaded him into an act so bizarre that he could have explained it to no one.

It had been the custom in Toledo for almost two centuries to have in the month of April a fiesta that filled the plaza with activity. It was the modern version of the ancient celebration that I had come down to photograph in 1961, and although by now it had degenerated-or grown-into primarily a series of three splendid bullfights attended by rich Americans, in my grandfather's day it had retained much of its original religious impulse. In 1868, when he had begun to whip the Mineral into productive order, he happened to ride through town when the fiesta was under way, and normally he would not have been interested in the goods and services on sale, for he needed none of them, but on this day he happened to notice a roving band of musicians whose like he had not heard before. They were wandering minstrels, seven rural men from the outlying villages, and they played music featuring a steady beat, an elegant use of strings and two of the best trumpeters he had ever heard, and as a military man he had heard many. They also had one violin player gifted with a voice capable of producing a soaring falsetto and he sang like a joyous lark reaching for the heavens.

Clay became so pleased with this music that for some time he followed the musicians as they strolled through the plaza, collecting coins. As he pa.s.sed an improvised shop peddling dolls, he saw something that caused him to stop abruptly. Forgetting about the musicians, he stared at one fairly large doll, rudely made but dressed in a splendidly sewn China Poblana, each detail of the dress done exactly right. The dress was a work of art, unlike the primitive doll it clothed-it was the best of Mexican workmans.h.i.+p married to the worst.

"How much, senora?" When the keeper of the stall gave a price less than a dollar in American money, Clay said: "I'll take it," and since it was not customary in the plaza for such a purchase to be wrapped, he continued his stroll with the big doll under his arm.

He had gone only a short distance when he heard his name, and turning around he found himself face-to-face with Senora Echeverria and her daughter. In that moment Alicia understood why my grandfather had bought this doll, and she gave Jubal a comforting smile as if to say: I was impressed with you, also. Jubal, realizing that he had betrayed his secret infatuation, felt blood rus.h.i.+ng to his face and tried to hide his doll in his arms, but Alicia laid her hand gently on his arm and said: "It's a handsome doll, Senor Clay, and it does look like me when I was her age," and she looked at her daughter, who smiled at the American.

The next months at the Mineral were depressing. Work did not move ahead as planned, production lagged and repairs were not made after Jubal had identified weak spots. Also, he was agitated by the presence of the China Poblana in his quarters and mortified that he had revealed his secret to Alicia. The doll became a self-inflicted wound reminding him that he had lost an important part of any decent life: partners.h.i.+p with a person of the opposite s.e.x.

Clay felt that his spirits might be lifted if he could at least improve the situation at the mine, and it occurred to him that if he could get two trained mechanics he could fix everything required. He remembered the group of Confederate exiles in the churchyard in Mexico City, and consulting with the Palafoxes, he promised them: "If one of you will go to that little church in the capital-it'll be easy to find-and bring me two good American mechanics ..."

"Why don't you go?" they asked, and he found himself riding to Queretaro and taking the train to Mexico City, but when he located the church where the Confederates had once a.s.sembled, he found them gone. Locals he interrogated told him that the Americans now congregated in a series of cantinas, and when he visited those bars he learned that the good workers had found jobs right away, while the others were still waiting for money from the Southern states and still getting drunk each night.

"Where could I find two good mechanics?" Clay asked, and the prospect of steady work was so inviting to the more responsible of the Confederates that several who'd held good jobs in the Old South wanted Clay to consider them. He picked two men, one from South Carolina and the other from Alabama, whom he felt he could trust, and his taking them to Toledo began the influx of Confederate expatriates that cl.u.s.tered about the Mineral. The two men Jubal hired proved excellent workmen, who in time married local women and raised children who spoke, acted and looked like average Mexicans. Such families, in turn, attracted other Confederates until the area contained numerous veterans, all of whom considered Jubal Clay their informal leader and spokesman since he had been a colonel in America and a foreman in Mexico.

When the families were settled, the men, none of whom had American wives, used to meet occasionally to talk about their activities during the war. Some had been at Gettysburg, others at the devastation of Antietam, but all found grim satisfaction in hearing what Colonel Clay had done in those incredible minutes at Cold Harbor or in the burning of Chambersburg, for as one of the men who had ridden with Jeb Stuart on his impetuous raids said: "Sometimes we won."

These men were disgusted when in 1869 they heard that General Grant had been installed as president because it reminded them that he had always been destined to win. But one Confederate-they never called themselves ex-Confederates, for they would consider themselves to be on active duty till they died-a man with a theological background, consoled his companions: "It proves to me that G.o.d really is a Confederate." When a man slow to catch on asked: "What do you mean?" the theologian said: "G.o.d is finally punis.h.i.+ng the North. Giving them Grant for a president. He'll ruin the country the way he wasted his army."

Gradually this cadre of loyalists surrendered the dream that they might one day return to take up arms against the North, but some vowed that if Canada ever decided to march south, they would flock back to help. Jubal's Southern patriotism flagged somewhat when a newcomer brought shocking news: "General Early has left Canada, accepted a presidential pardon and is now serving as front man for a group of gamblers in New Orleans." Refusing to believe this of his former leader, Clay kept making inquiries till he learned from a reliable source: "Yes, the two generals, Beauregard and Early, are working for a gang of gamblers in Louisiana, but it ain't as bad as it sounds. They been appointed by the state to see the lottery is kept honest. Couldn't find two better guarantees than names like Beauregard and Early."