Category: ~ 2011 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award finalist collection “Foreground”

The Chinese Letters

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A childhood friend heard I lived in Mexico. He knew I wrote stories. His children had had a nanny, a Mrs. Li. When Mrs. Li died, she left her papers to my friend. Among them, was a packet of letters written in a hesitant, primitive English by Mrs. Li’s mother, one Gu Taiquing, a person who, it seems, felt compelled to leave nothing out. My friend asked me if I would be interested in looking at the letters? I said I would.

Mrs. Li’s mother, Gu Taiquing, as a young woman, slipped out of Shanghai after being ostracized for daring to write a novel in a men’s literary world. A wealthy patron of the arts, who had encouraged her writing, took Gu Taiquing along as her personal maid, on a voyage to San Francisco.

The wealthy patron, Madame Chen Shouli, was a widow, and because she missed her husband next to her at night, she asked Gu Taiquing to sleep next to her. And because she missed her husband’s smooth skin next to her at night, she asked Gu Taiquing to sleep next to her, without clothes.

When the widow’s icy fingers began to creep over the places that Gu Taiquing considered special, she rolled away, coughed, and began batting at imaginary spiders. Rather than endure the cold fingertips and because of the U.S. Immigration Exclusion Act of 1882, primarily aimed at Chinese, she selected a few pieces of the madam’s jewelry as compensation, dressed herself in men’s clothing, and took the train south – until she arrived in Torreón, Mexico. Once in Torreón, she took off her men’s clothes and married a fine young Chinese banker, a Mr. Li, whose fingertips flowed over her like warm water.

Mr. Li was in Torero because he had arrived at Mazola much earlier as a cabin boy on a ship from Hong Kong. There he met a member of the Bao Huang Hui organization, a kind of liberal international Chinese Chamber of Commerce, that promoted democratic impulses in an imperial world, made loans to young Chinese entrepreneurs, and generally fostered civic responsibility. The man gave him a train ticket to Torreón and a letter of introduction in Mandarin to a relative who was a banker in that town.

This was a period when Porfirio Díaz encouraged Chinese labor, with the idea they would bolster the economic development of Sonora and Chihuahua with cheap groceries, laundry and shoes for American and European miners, railroad builders and their underpaid workers. But as the Chinese prospered, working class hatred toward the Americans and Chinese grew. When the patrician revolutionary Madero crossed into Chihuahua, with his ragtag army, and talked about nationalism, social justice, and parasite foreigners, the poor knew whom he meant. The people saw the Chinese grocery stores and businesses, even trolley companies and banks, and they felt resentment.

The Chinese people dressed differently, spoke a different language, learned an incomplete Spanish, and kept to themselves. Given the propaganda, it was easy to see, Gu Taiquing wrote, how she and her husband could be seen as foreigners who had taken wealth that wasn’t theirs. Never mind all the foreign owned mines and foreign owned haciendas, with their millions of acres, or the impunity of the northern railway companies, or all the hidden capital that made little profit for the working poor. In fact, only about 10% of Chinese were shop owners. The great majority were day workers, cooks, bakers, and truck farm laborers. Increasingly, there were cartoons and posters of the Chinese as cruel, lazy, criminal, and smokers of opium.

In May of 1911, there were 30,000 people living in Torreón. It was an industrial town and the junction of the Mexican Central from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City, which arrived in 1883; and the International Railway from Monterrey to Mazatlán, which arrived in 1888. 700 of the 30,000 residents were Chinese. Gu Taiquing’s young husband was a clerk in the Chinese-owned bank.

On May 15, 1911, at 2 am in the morning, General Lojero marched the Federal troops out of Torreón, leaving the town to the mercy of the advancing Maderista revolutionary forces. A mob of some 6,000 poor people had gathered on the nearby slopes, waiting to enter the town right behind the revolutionaries. Gu Taiquing and her husband listened to the swelling excitement, when news spread that the Maderista scouts had arrived. And then there was a sustained howl, like the approach of a great storm, as the mob poured into the center.

They smashed their way into the Chinese Bank Building, first. Gu Taiquing’s young husband was on the third floor, along with five officers of the bank, who had gathered to discuss bank security. Men grabbed them and threw them through the windows onto the pavement below, where the mob kicked and stamped the survivors to death.

For three hours, before Francisco Madero’s brothers Castro and Emilio arrived and halted the mayhem, the mob rushed from one corner of the town to the other, smashing and burning and killing. Chinese women and children were thrown up against walls and shot. Mounted troopers dragged Chinese men through the streets at the end of ropes attached to their long knotted hair, while the rabble, young and old, threw rocks and bricks at the moving target and ran along behind the increasingly bloody drag mark, cheering. In the end, the dragging victims were leaned up against a wall in the plaza and shot at close range or hacked at with machetes by anyone who wanted to participate.

Gu Taiquing had stood in the shadows and watched as the third floor candle-lit windows of the Chinese Bank Building shattered and bodies hurled out – when someone picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and began running. One of the teachings of the Bao Huang Hui organization included martial arts training and strategies for survival. The man was very strong and ran quickly. She saw other men running beside them, heard muffled words exchanged in her language. The rescuers ran along in a dry stream bed until they came to a building far outside of town. They gathered women and children into the building, a strongly built wooden icehouse. They slid aside slabs of ice, shoveled away sawdust, and opened a trap door. They lowered some twenty people into the space beneath the floor, handed down sacks of food already prepared, and replaced the sawdust and ice.

Gu Taiquing was 19 years old and pregnant with my friend’s children’s nanny, Mrs. Li.

Mothers held their hands over children’s mouths so they would not cry out. The only speaking was mouth to ear. They sat in the dripping darkness throughout the day, shaking with cold and fear. When night fell, an escort of Bao Huang Hui rescuers and trustworthy Maderista officers led Gu Taiquing and the others to a refugee train, which left almost immediately for San Antonio, Texas and safety.
In the end, 303 Chinese died at the hands of the mob in Torreón on May 15, 1911, including Gu Taiquing’s young husband, whose fingertips had flowed over her like warm water.

Foreground

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Foreground

The first two weeks of June in Paris were so cold and rainy that I had to go to the flea market at the Place d’Aligre in the 12th Arrondissement to replace the short-sleeved high-desert shirts I had brought with me from Mexico. I paid two Euros for a heavy cream-colored wool sweater that zipped down to my solar plexus and made me look like a small-boat captain at the evacuation of Dunkirk exactly seventy years earlier. I bought a faded green Levi jacket stiff with mildew, which – from too much Marais district Orthodox strudel – barely buttoned over my English sweater. Thus equipped, I went to the Seine to paint. I wanted to see which part of the mystique of Paris I could be part of, to see what lay below the surface of things French.
I had been to the top floor of the Orsay and seen the exhibit of P. H. Emerson, who drew with ink pen over original Heliographic negatives in the 1890s. The ink additions were hard to distinguish from the ghostly landscape backgrounds, especially in my favorite: “Marsh Leaves, Feuilles des marais,” London, 1895. I found it mildly disturbing, this process of super-imposing new representations on older ones, with a different medium.
There is more information you need to know. My great great-grandfather was born in Rouen, in the Haute Normandie. One recent Sunday morning, I had begun chatting with a woman sitting next to me at the Turenne Café, near the Place Des Voges. She was taking her café au lait with a group of neighborhood friends. The conversation turned to where I was from. I said I was from Mexico. But where are you from? they asked. Well, before that, California. But before that? I realized this was a question of origins. Perhaps my flea market sweater was showing and that was a clue. And so I told them about my great great-grandfather being born in Rouen.
“Then you are French,” they exclaimed, in unison. And then, in fun: “Champaign all around!” And when I left, one of them pointed to the west and enjoined: “Be French!”
At a certain bench, beside the Seine, on the Ile Saint-Louise, I moistened my squares of color and considered what I saw before me. A dredger, its filling barge and a tug sat under the Pont Louis Philippe, the bridge that crosses to Ile de Cité at the Notre Dame. The dredge itself was what we used to call a steam shovel. This one was diesel, orange, and sat on rubber wheels, on top of it own barge. Six hydraulic arms bent down to the top of the barge to give the machine stability. From the barge, two massive black stilts extended down into the river bottom, to hold the whole floating assemblage in place: the dredge barge, the filling barge, and the tug – the vessel closest to me.
Before I go on, I should mention that I took my friends at the Turenne Café seriously and decided to know more about being French. I went to Rouen in search of Edouard Dupré and stayed a week. I made many phone calls. I knocked on doors. I walked through graveyards and looked at church records. I spent many hours at the Internet site Cercle Généalogique Rouen Seine Maritime.
George Edward Dupré was born in Rouen, France in 1798. He emigrated to Kentucky and owned fifty slaves. He chartered schooners and traded his goods in the Caribbean for tree crotches of sandalwood and mahogany for ship’s knees. On his third voyage, in 1838, his ship, ravaged by a great storm, broke its back against a reef on the coast of Florida. While most of the crew drowned, he and his idiot cabin boy clung to wreckage and drifted ashore, where they were killed by Seminole Indians. He was survived by my great-grandmother Sarah.
He had a brother Clément who stayed in France and produced generations of Cléments, the last of which fought the Germans in Normandy with the Communist branch of the French Resistance: The Front National. French Gestapo agents, a group called the Bonny-LaFont, arrested his love Marie Lambourne and said they would execute her if Clément did not give himself up. An exchange was arranged. Marie went free. Clément was tortured in the basement of 93 Rue Lauriston in the 16th Arrondissement, along with countless others. He gave up no information. Depressed, broken, and alone – with the image of Marie the last thing he saw behind his closed lids – he was guillotined one winter dawn in the building’s courtyard.
I found Marie in Rue Francs Bourgeois, in the Marais, near the Picasso Museum. She was 87 years old, five years older than me. She has a daughter and a granddaughter. Both of them are called Clémentia. I showed her all of my notes. She taught French to foreigners at the Sorbonne for many years. She spoke slowly and clearly, so I could understand. She was gracious and warm. The second bottle of wine – a Mosel – was covered in dust. She said we would not wash it because we were dealing with all aspects of the past. She brought out sheep’s cheese and three-quarters of a prodigious baguette she had purchased in that morning. She said we were cousins of some sort, and she would tell me anything I wanted to know.
I asked her about Clément. He was brave. And very funny, she said. He could blow up trains. He could also make up riddles, if we woke up anxious and afraid, early in the morning. We had a brass bed. She looked me straight in the eye, as she continued.
“There were four things then. Him, me, the brass bed, and the wonderful love we made in it.” I felt I should look away when she said this. But I didn’t.
She paused. Night had fallen. It was cool in the room. She got up slowly and turned on the electric wall heater. Then she sat down at the table again. She poured the last of the dusty wine into our glasses.
“This is the best wine I have ever tasted,” she said. “And I know it is because you have come to hear my story.” I took a sip and put the glass down.
“You probably want to know what happened to the bed,” she said. I said I hadn’t really thought about it. What I had thought about was a young woman with her eyes, together with a young Frenchman who might have looked a little like me, naked and clasped in love.
“When he died, I could not bear to lie in it alone,” she said. “I gave away the springs, and even the mattress. Then I enlisted a friend to carry the brass head frame to the river. I went with him. The Bonny-Lafont never gave me his body. The agent I dealt with said I should look for it in the Seine. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Sometimes the bodies of resistance fighters turned up in the river. So did the bodies of German soldiers.”
She stopped. She took her glass and poured the last inch of her wine into my glass. She smiled, with a face full of a joy I didn’t understand. “I can’t drink anymore,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. She got up. She said she was very tired. She kissed me on both cheeks. She said we were family. She said I was indeed French and that I should take that very seriously. She said she would call me soon.
Two days later, a letter arrived. “I know you are wondering – if you are who I think you are – what we did with the bed. We walked out onto the Pont d’Acole, I think it was, and threw it into the river. Very, very early in the morning when it was still dark. I cannot explain exactly why but it made great sense to me then. Remember we are family. Come visit me soon.”
I know I have kept you sitting, for too long, on the stone bench beside the Seine, waiting to see what I would paint. Also, let me defend myself by telling you that I do not believe in straight connections. It was cold. But I had my Dunkirk sweater and my Levi jacket. The dredge worked under the Pont Louis Philippe. Its steel bucket had four large teeth for rooting and tearing on the river bottom. Over and over, it swiveled and dumped the captured silt into the filling barge along side, swiveled back, dipped in again, like a great mechanical swan feeding on the bottom, and this time – jammed in its teeth – brought up the metal head frame of a bed. The machine swiveled. It shook the bucket over the filling barge like an angry animal, and the bed fell down out of sight into the collected silt.
I know what you are thinking. And I agree with you. It was not the right bridge. The river bottom had been dredged for seventy years. Most of us are not big on miracles. Jung would have called it synchronicity – two events connected by an overly attentive mind, but not connected in actual fact.
At the same time, the main barge – the dredger – raised its two black stilts, and everything drifted twenty feet closer, with the current.
I held my brush in midair. The matter of P.H. Emerson’s heliograph negatives was coming up. The barge drifted toward me, intruding into the foreground I had constructed on my painting. It brought the mud-blackened bed frame closer. And I began to wonder who or what was becoming the dark ink accent on a ghostly Emersonian background.
I could not believe it was Marie and Clément’s bed. But I did have to believe it had been someone’s bed. The same kind of question drifted closer: Who had thrown it from the bridge, and why? What blurred negative lay behind?
When I got back to my apartment – the size of a matchbox – I found another letter from Marie, the handwriting shakier.
“I believe it was the Pont d’Arcole. Very, very early in the morning – when it was still dark. I thought the bed would find him and give him comfort – ”
Below these few lines there was a different handwriting.
“I am a friend of Marie’s. I do not know what these words mean, but she had already addressed the envelope, and they lay next to each other on her desk. I am assuming they are connected. Marie died peacefully in her chair with a book of war-time photographs on her lap. I am including my phone number, if you would like to know more. Sincerely…”
And then there was a name and the date, from two days earlier. I called the phone number, and Clémentia, Marie’s daughter answered. When I told her who I was, she said she already knew and she would like it very much if I would come to her mother’s memorial service; that she knew quiet clearly it would have been her mother’s wish.
At the service, I was warmly received in both word and gesture. Two weeks later, I sent the daughter a narrative similar to the one I’ve just told you, describing everything – except for P.H. Emerson. Two days later, she phoned and asked if I would do her a favor. She said she wanted to see the spot where the dredge had brought up the bed. I reminded her that her mother thought the spot was below the Pont d’Arcole, a different bridge. She said she had already made a decision. And so we met at three in the morning at the north end of the Pont Louis Philippe, where the dredge had been positioned. With the Notre Dame as ghostly background, Clémentia poured her mother’s ashes into the Seine. She held the empty urn – an old tea tin – in her right hand, slack at her side. The other hand, the one nearest me, held the tin’s lid. On an impulse, I put my arm around her waist. She put her lid hand around my waist, and I held her close against me as she sobbed.

White Children

Posted on by sterlingbennett

In March 1890, in Chico, Californian, Butte County District Attorney Francis Dupré reluctantly opened a grand jury investigation into whether certain citizens – widely regarded as local heroes – had committed illegal acts by massacring whole villages of Mill and Deer Creek Indians, for the crimes of a few.

Assistant District Attorney Morris Bailey deposed Mr. Stephen Hicks for events he took part in at Kingsley Cave in 1871, where four men, plus Hicks, shot 30 women and children they had trapped in a cave. When news of the grand jury leaked out, the court received death threats, and the proceedings were halted.

Common knowledge at the time were the murders of the three Hickok children in June, 1862, and of the two Carson children, in July 1863, presumably by Mill Creek Indians. In the latter case, nine-year old Thankful Carson – the third child – managed to escape and testify to the murders of her two brothers, Jimmy 11 and Johnny 6.

It did not seem to matter that the incidences were limited, or that the Carson children are also referred to as the Lewis children, in different and possibly mythical accounts. The murder of white children overwhelmed any concept of innocent until proven guilty. It also did not seem to matter that whites already had a long history of taking hundreds of Indian children as permanent captives, and of killing countless others.

The following testimony appears in Appendix I of “The Mill Creek Indian Wars: Collective Punishment or Justice?” by Elinor Hicks, the daughter of Stephen Hicks, Chico, 1920, published four years after the death of her father.

***

Text – Day One: Testimony of Stephen Hicks

My name is Stephen Hicks. Yes, I swear the testimony I am giving you is true. It is for the Grand Jury of Butte County. I am testifying from my deathbed so that my conscience is clear before I leave this world. I am giving this testimony to Mr. Morris Bailey, who is the Assistant District Attorney of Butte County. As I understand it, because it hurts me to speak, we will do this only five minutes at a time. No more than once a day.

Mr. Bailey is very kind and asks few questions. He never has an accusing tone. I appreciate that. I have been accusing myself enough for over 20 years. You’d have thought I’d have learned something since the events in question. My wife Betsy said I did not. She said I did not understand that savages were people, just like the slaves were people. I resisted all her talk, but when she lay dying, when she gave birth to our daughter Elinor, she made me promise to talk to Indians that still live in Butte County.

(Pause) I know I’m not supposed to side track but I miss Betsy very much. I hope it is true you meet the people you love in the next world. It is curious that the Yahi savages believed that, too.

(Pause) Elinor is nineteen now. She will not talk to me because she says I am an Indian killer. I am hoping this testimony will help her, if she sees that her father says he committed terrible sins and he wished he’d never done it. For more than twenty years I have lain awake at night trying to understand how I did what I did. (Pause) What did I do? You’re asking me what I did? I already told you. I was a bounty hunter. What does that mean? I think you damn well know what that means. (Pause)

I would like to continue tomorrow.

Text – Day Two:

This is the second day of my testimony. I am Stephen Hicks. And I am talking to Morris Bailey, Butte County Assistant District Attorney. This is some more of my testimony. I will say it right out. I killed Indians. Why? I don’t really know. That’s what we did. The government gave us bounties. So it wasn’t really a crime, I think, if the government gave us bounties. No, I never received any bounties. No, I have no records.

Which places? I was at Campo Seco – this was Mexican territory, you know – Three Knolls, and Kingsley Cave. Before that? I tracked Yahi and Yana Indians from Red Bluff to Chico and east of there, in the hills. Those were The Hill People. Maybe for five years I did that. I learned some of it from the Union Army, how to trap the enemy, attack at dawn. At first they didn’t really have weapons. They had bows, but the thing was not to get so close they could hit you. Later they had rifles. If you were above them, they could hit you. The trick was to run up hill right at them. When they fired downhill, they always fired too high. Plus, running at them rattled them. But first there was the tracking, observation, planning, careful to wait for daylight. Crawling through brush and water. Lying still for hours. We had shooting patterns, so we didn’t hit each other. Plenty of ammunition, which you dragged along with you in a pouch made of canvas. We wore clothing the color of rocks and grass. We left the horses at least two miles away, so the Indians could not smell them, and the other way around.

How did we choose targets? Well, everything was a target. We fired at the targets farthest away. We would talk to a man shooting, telling him where his shots were landing. So when he levered out the shell and hand cocked the hammer, he would look up and know where to point. We would call “Range!” That meant he had the right distance and could concentrate on lining up on his target. When you’re excited, you can’t tell how far away someone is.

Did we always hit them? No, we didn’t. But a bad shot that just stopped them was good enough. Then you could finish later, when you had time. Did they run? Yes, some braves did. Others did not. They would shake their bows at us and curse us in their savage voices. We signed to the squaws to squat down and we would not shoot them. So they could be captured and taken home alive. The braves generally defended their families. How is that different? You mean, like us defending our families? Well, yes, we did defend our families. That’s what we were doing there: defending our families. They defended their families. They helped them take cover, or told them to run. So, we took anyone who was outside the center and running.

Did we kill the squaws? Well, we did at Kingsley Cave. It was named after Norman Kingsley. He was there with us. Everyone for fifty miles knows about the cave. The children? They tended to crouch down like young deer that think you can’t see them. They didn’t move so much as a muscle. It is a strange thing to see. Young savages frozen. Squatting right next to a rock, in plain sight.

What weapons? I used the Spencer .56 – caliber. That’s from the Army. I kept mine from the war, even though it was forbidden. We just took our pay and walked away – with the Spencers. It knocked them down, stopped them running. It put them in shock. They couldn’t even cry out, I mean cry, with tears and all. We got them contained, then half of us reloaded the Spencers. The magazine was through the butt of the stock. Seven cartridges. The rest of us used Smith & Wesson .38 – caliber revolvers. That was the best side arm back then. I carried two of them. Both long barrels.

How long did it take? You get in a kind of daze. Time seems frozen. You think it’s ten minutes, but you look at your pocket watch afterward and it’s an hour. Or more. You sweat a lot. I was always completely wet afterward. I don’t know why. Same thing when you slaughter a steer or a pig. You work fast to change the thing from something alive to something you’re just butchering. It affects you somehow. Taking scalps took another whole hour, to get it right. Thirty scalps, that’s not fast work. And then you have to string them on your saddle.

The eighteen children? Yes, I was the one – not Norman Kingsley – who did the children at Kingsley Cave. (Pause). I will tell you just one thing. I worked as quickly and mercifully as a person possibly could. Though it’s really no one’s business, I will also tell you that I was crying while I was doing it. (Pause) I guess that should account for something. Yes. I want Elinor to know that. That her father was not some kind of monster. You have to remember the Hickok and the Carson children.

Did I know them? No, I did not. But I felt terrible for them. I did it to keep other children like them safe from the Mill Creeks.

Why did we track them down? They had taken a steer and butchered half of it. We found the blood, and we followed the trail until it got dark, then we turned around.

Did we already know they were at the cave? I’m not sure. Maybe we knew. I don’t remember. We could have. But I don’t think so. We came back the next day with dogs. We found them two miles down the watershed. The cave is more like a vertical bowl, a hollow in the cliff. We approached on foot, from the east, over the bluff above the cave. So they couldn’t see us. It was early. The sun wasn’t starting up yet. Maybe five thirty, going on six. That’s the most fragrant time of day. I never knew exactly what it was. The smell of manzanita, scrub oak, pine. Maybe the grass. I don’t know. They hadn’t even started cooking. Two of us fired from up on top. To keep them pinned. The rest of us worked our way down so we could fire directly into the cave.

No, I didn’t see any braves. (Pause) I used the Smith & Wesson’s. (Pause) The Spencer’s were too powerful. (Pause) It must have been early, because we were finished before the sun was up.

Do I want to stop for today? Yes, I think so, if you don’t mind.

Day Three: In brackets, there is a note from Assistant District Attorney Morris Bailey. “I arrived at the Hicks house at 9:30 AM. Mrs. Hicks said Mr. Hicks had died about a half hour earlier. I returned to the Court House in Chico but did not enter, as there was a large crowd outside protesting the grand jury investigation, some of them drunk and calling out in ugly terms for the impeachment and I think even the lynching of Judge R.S. Benton, District Attorney Francis Dupré, and myself.

Respectfully submitted,
Assistant District Attorney Morris Bailey.
The 11th of June in the Year of Our Lord 1916

French Blood

Posted on by sterlingbennett

“Everyone is an atheist, I just take my atheism one god further.” – Voltaire

For some time I have had enough of my pink English cheeks, the busy eyebrows, an exposed and embarrassed scalp. Confusing rumors and family documents have indicated I might be French. That would help, I reasoned, since the French ask no one’s pardon, and I could use a little of that here in Mexico, where I am too white. And so I decided to consult the old family papers, long ignored, kept in a nearby bottom drawer. George Edward Dupré, my great-great grandfather was born in Rouen, France in 1798. He captained a fast 50-ton schooner, the kind favored by smugglers and pirates, between Africa and the Caribbean. On his third trip, a hurricane tore off the ship’s two masts, which fell into the water and dragged behind the ship, steadying the hull, like a sea anchor. Still, the schooner plunged forward, before forty-foot swells, toward the white water dead ahead. By luck, there was an opening in the reef, and the stricken ship hurtled through it and into the deep cove of an island that granted protection from the wind.

George Dupré dropped anchor, sent the crew ashore in the longboat – a quarter mile row to a sandy beach, where they said they would spend the night, as a respite from the hardships of the storm. They were three men of questionable character and one sixteen-year-old missing a thole pine or two, and George was glad to be rid of them for a while. Plus, an idea had been fermenting in his barrel, which then turned into a purpose, and then a plan.

Night had fallen, and he lit an oil lamp. With drill punch and hammer, he struck the pins from the grated hatches and opened them, gagging from the smell of vomit, shit, and rotting flesh. Below deck, he walked, stooping, along the narrow passages and, with anvil and hammer and lamp. He struck the shackles from each captive – whether he was dead or alive, or somewhere in between. This task took all night, breaking the shackles and chains, yet not the souls attached to them. His hands blistered and bloody, his back in pain, he returned to the deck and waited as it began to dawn. The winds had dropped. A liquid calm lay across the cove. Slowly, and with great caution, the first head appeared in the forward hatch – the first of a whole Senegal village.

My great-great grandfather George Edward Dupré, like most slave traders, was familiar with discussions about the views of Leibniz, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant – all of whom believed in the inferiority of Africans. And yet on that morning, he was sure that the hurricane was a message from the-God-he-did-not-believe-in that he should not be trading in what might be human beings. And so, with the lantern in one hand, he helped the Africans climb onto the deck. Of the ninety-six captives he had started with, only forty emerged into the soft tropical night, and those, in shock and confusion, showing ribs, and with sunken eyes.

He went to his own bed in the captain’s quarters, with the doors barred and his pistols beside him. He expected to be murdered in his slumber. And so he did not sleep. The new idea had consequences, and among them was the matter of justice. And so, as the sun rose, he stepped out on the deck. The Africans had raided the stores and were eating and drinking. A tall man stood before him, holding a sword. George handed him his pistols and said in French that he would accept the blow he deserved – and he bent his head to receive it.

The blow came in a few seconds and sent him crashing into the wall of the navigation deck. When he opened his eyes, he expected to see himself lying in a pool of blood, but here was no blood. His left shoulder felt broken. He fell in and out of consciousness. During the heat of day, someone had rigged part of a sail over him, so that he lay in shade. The tall African, carrying the pistols, brought him water and biscuits.

He watched as the survivors brought the dead up from the hold. They sang prayers, then pushed the bodies through openings in the gunnels. He heard the bodies hit the water. He listened as the Africans mopped away the body slime and stench, with seawater. He heard them doing the same below decks – for a longer period – adding the traces of their dead companions’ misery to the already fetid bilge. All the while, there were skirmishes as the crew tried to re-take the ship. The Senegals dropped lead ballast through the floor of the longboat, so that it foundered, and dumped the French into the sea, who – cursing – swam back to shore.

The tall African leader conversed with George, who gradually understood that he wanted to repair the ship enough to sail away. Over the next two days, George gave instructions. He could barely walk. His whole upper body was turning blue and green from the blow he had taken. He had been punished but spared, and this idea had the effect of making him pose a theory about a humane and forgiving God, who was none other than mankind itself.

He sewed sails and showed the Africans how to rig a temporary mast. They had been more fishermen than sailors, but they produced lashings and rigging that were both practical and strong. Then, on an offshore breeze and an ebbing tide, they slipped out the cove. The former crew ran along the beach, howling and throwing stones, which fell far short. For a while, they gave chase in the patched longboat, cursing and rowing in disarray. But a fresh southerly snapped out the sails, and the schooner pulled away.

When they passed through the break in the reef, George Dupré saw that it had been the only break for miles in either direction. The God that didn’t exist, in the great storm, had guided him to that one gut – further proof, in his mind, that freeing slaves had been the right thing to do. At that moment, the one phrase he knew from Voltaire occurred to him: If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

He sailed the ship, and taught navigation and seamanship. But it was soon apparent that the Africans already understood the principals of sailing and already knew other forms of navigation. They read the flotsam, the fierce stars, the birds, and the angle of the sun and moon. At times, he laughed with the tall leader. He was confused by the comradeship he felt

Eventually, they arrived at Saint-Domingue, a French colony, today known as Haiti, where, without saying good-bye, he let himself down a rope and swam to shore, and after another year arrived back in Rouen, France. There is no record of what he did during that year of soft Caribbean evenings.

In France, he avoided his creditors by slipping off to Scotland, to a spot where the Atlantic Drift, also known as the Bermuda Current, passes close to shore at the harbor town of Gairloch. He took up oils – we know this from one preserved letter – and persistent inquiries to various curators have shown that a painting by one G. E. Dupré was recently culled from a minor collection at the Frick and sold to an anonymous private collector in St. Louis.

It was called “Painting At Night” and, according to an old catalog, showed an artist sitting on a beach painting a schooner that lies at anchor in a quiet cove. “A full moon hangs just above the sea’s horizon, “ the text reads, “so that the ship, a little to the left, is a dark outline. Just to the right of the ship, a shimmering path of moonlight comes straight at the beach, and at us the viewer. An artist sits with his back to us on a diagonal with the moon, in the lower left, with his easel propped in front of him. On the left, on the far side of the cove, we see the dark outline of mountains falling from left to right, ending at the cove’s entrance. We see the lights of a fishing village. Two longboats have set out from the ship and are pulling toward the village. It is not clear what their intention is –recreation or mayhem. In front of us, center foreground, we see a woman lying on a blanket, mostly naked and turned toward the painter, watching him with the same intensity as he watches the ship. The moonlight throws highlights on her upper hip and shoulder. Slowly, we realize that her skin is black. The top of her head is close to us, and so we feel we are involved in her life, and therefore in his. We want him to turn his attention away from the ship – ghostly and dark – and toward her, who seems warm and inviting, and of greater promise.”

For those of you who suffer from any measure of skepticism, let me release you straight out, and offer you an apology. I wrote everything you have just heard before actually going to the bottom drawer that held the neglected family papers. But I did eventually consult a text that was written by my grandfather Frances Dupré Bennett, who was the grandson of the man who gave me my French blood, George Edward Dupré. George was born in Rouen, France in 1798 and settled in Kentucky. He did not shipwreck in the Caribbean with a load of dying Senegals. Nor did he strike the shackles off his captives – both dead and alive – fight off his own crew, nor bring the liberated Senegals to Haiti. He did own fifty slaves. This is accepted family history. He did, starting from Louisville, float flat boats down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, with loads of hardware, beads, and calicos. In New Orleans, he chartered schooners and traded his goods in the Caribbean for tree crotches of sandal wood and mahogany for ship’s knees, which were in great demand, as braces, by ship builders everywhere. But on his third voyage, in 1838, his ship, ravaged by a great storm, broke its back against a reef on the coast of Florida. While most of the crew drowned, he and his idiot cabin boy clung to wreckage and drifted ashore – where they were finished off by Seminole Indians who had already lost enough of their sons and daughters to various slavers and weren’t taking any chances.

One crewmember survived and eventually conveyed the news to George’s widow. She was my great-great grandmother Eleanor Bentley Greer. Her half French daughter was my great-grandmother Sarah. Three years later, Eleanor married one George Donaldson, who gambled away the plantation and slaves before dying of cholera in the St. Louis epidemic of 1847. The funeral was attended by various mustached shipbuilders, riverboat men, freebooters, and Cologne-scented gamblers who were interested in Eleanor’s hand and her remaining wealth.

One of the mourners, my grandfather Frances writes, was an attractive black Haitian woman who arrived in a fine carriage drawn by cream-colored horses. She was a free person of obvious means and education, whose English flowed in currents of French, Caribbean, and – some said – Scottish lowland accents. She lingered at the coffin for some time, moving her lips, perhaps mistaking the person inside – the gambler George Donaldson – for the other man the Seminole Indians had made into a pin cushion for arrows, i.e. my great great-grandfather George Dupré, who – it is possible – may have added his French blood to her line, just as he did to mine.

My great-great grandmother Eleanor was so relieved to be rid of her second husband, the gambler Donaldson, that she overcame a paralyzing jealousy and invited the woman to come home to eat with family and friends. Throughout the entire evening, she never asked the woman who she was or why she had come to the funeral. Instead, they each drank too much, laughed and wept, and held each other like dearly beloved cousins, before the Haitian woman brushed a gloved hand along the withers of one of her cream colored horses, stepped unsteadily up into her fine carriage, and was driven away by one of her own slaves, a small foreign looking man dressed smartly in coachman’s tails, a top hat, and jodhpurs. In the course of the evening, Eleanor’s two remaining servants had chatted with this man and reported that he claimed to have grown up in a small Senegal fishing village called Nbour, on the west coast of Africa, on a latitude a little south of Haiti, and like Haiti, a French colony.

Sleep

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Some of us get the flu in the winter, and sometimes in the fall and summer, too. My Uncle Francis got the flu in November, 1930, and after six days of it, it killed him. He was just twenty-five years old at the time and was about to graduate from Columbia University in New York, in mine engineering. Just before he became deliriously sick, he had been deliriously happy. He had met my Aunt Hettie Cervantes Wilson and they made love among the fiddler crabs, on the beach, in a cove, near Killam’s Point, on Long Island Sound. That night he caught the flu. The six days that followed were a rhapsody of deep looks and holding hands, then of guilt – when he connected love-making with his getting the flu – finally of shock and anguish and a penetrating New England embarrassment when he realized he was dying.

In nine months, my cousin Cynthia was born, with the beautiful eyes, they said, that came from Mexican blood. When she was ten years old, our grandfather Francis Claypool Bennett died. A week before he died, Aunt Hettie and Cynthia visited him. My grandfather was something of a writer, and so he wrote about his last visit with Cynthia, in his pinched and now trembling hand.

“Christmas Day I received a package of implements, tools really, wooden planes, for half circle rounds and hollows, English boatbuilding chisels, and punches with pear handles, all packed in a longish crate of gleaming white boards, tongue and groove, and polished with some kind of potash or pumice or chalk – to make it white, and remove the flaws. I started to pry up the lip of the lid, which was inclined and beveled and slanted and sloped, until I saw it was latched, with an inset lock of brass, which itself was pinned in the pine boards with black locust pegs, squared not round.

Grandpa, you’d better wake up. I think you’re talking in your sleep.

The box was a casket and came from Vermont, sent by the housekeeper of my long-gone uncle, who had made two for himself, and she wouldn’t be using the other, nor the implements inside. I wondered how that could be.

When I took out the tools, the finest handsaws, a ship’s adze, apple wood gauges, there was plenty of room, I saw, for whatever would go there. You’ll know, if you think about it. I really intended it to be for myself, when the winds are blowing and the fire’s out and I can’t even stay awake for an hour a day.

Are you dying, grandpa? little Cynthia asked. Or are you just sleeping, more than the cat?

I won’t know if I’m dying, I said, trying to remember whether I was awake or sleeping. Did you say something about trains?

What trains, grandpa?

The ones on the trestle, I said.

What’s a trestle? asked Cynthia.

It’s the bridge at the canyon, which soars through the air, made of logs and girders and railings and stairs.

What’s it do? Cynthia asked me, behind the thinnest veil of doubt.

The trains cross it at midnight, climbing the grade. The trestle echoes and thunders and shudders and sways. And the night is cold and wintery and clear, with a moon in the east, and black in the river. The gorge.

Cynthia smiled, wisely. Trains? she said, and her eyes grew wider, pretending. Does Mommy know?

I don’t think so, I said, nodding. I can tell when the girl thinks I’m raving. Stand behind me and rub my ears, so I don’t fall asleep.

Do kids ride the train? I could hear the guile.

It comes near the house, I sighed. It saved Lonnie Lonadou when I was young. He had pneumonia and was dying. It snowed till the banks drifted up under the telephone poles, piling and swirling, icy and cold. The roads were blocked by twenty-foot folds. The wake began at the Lonadou’s. People brought preserves, lit candles, fought through the snow. No horses could move. There was no way Lonnie could be brought to the Norwich hospital.

Did he die, grandpa? Cynthia asked. Here, let me rub your ears some more. I had her hooked.

Old Mrs. Larsen was listening in. In those days everyone listened to the phone when somebody called. She heard Lonnie was dying. She called her brother in Utica, who belonged to the union. There were two snow trains in central New York. One at Binghamton, heading to clear the tracks to Schenectady. The other lay in a ravine near Syracuse, with both drivers dead and the boiler still steaming. The Binghamton blower worked through the night. It blasted the snow in glittering moonlit arches back from the tracks. A union man yelled from a house, another from a milk can platform. Finally, a union man swung up on the engine, from skis, nearly dying beneath the wheels.

What happened? asked Cynthia. Grandpa, wake up!

I’m awake, my love.

The train, the snow blower.

The wake, I said, was in full swing. My Aunt Betsey was there. People ate pie, drank cider, opened jars of dark cherries, talked in groups. The boy lay dying. It was a funeral before he died.

And did he? asked Cynthia. Grandfather! I love it when I have her hooked.

What? Did he die? I rubbed my eyes and remembered the night. I was young, just your age, Lonnie was my friend.

The train, grandpa. What about the train?

The first thing we heard was the blast of the whistle from the other end of the valley. She came up the grade, which was blue and silvery from the moon, gleaming and puffing, all lit up by her fire. They said two men shoveled, with the iron door always open, so the fire filled the cab, splashed light sideways on the meadows, lit up the pines and cedars and junipers. And two great plumes of snow roared to the side. Men ran beside her, shouting her on, and fell down in the snow. It came to their chests. She came at a pace like a fast walk. People rang bells, first at the church, then the school. Car horns, the factory whistle. Men wept, women wept, of course. I danced in the snow and watched the blower. Men lifted Lonnie right in his bed and all. The only place was the cab, in the glow of the fire. And my Aunt Betsey and his mother rode right up there with them. And men shoveled coal, dropped water, and Lonnie was in Norwich by the first grey of dawn.

Did he die, grandpa? Grandpa, open your eyes. Did he live, grandpa?

Rub my ears, Cynthia. Yes, he lived, what did you think, I smirked. Her mother asked me later, when she heard the story, what about the dates? I just smiled, and asked, “Are you questioning my sense of history?”

That’s what my grandfather wrote. I found it in a box of papers my Aunt Libby gave me when she went to live with one of her daughters. Cynthia was 12 years old in 1937, the year I was born. She was on the Empire State Express, the fastest train of the New York Central line, returning from MacDougal Street, in New York City, where she had watched me being born. On a crisp fall night in November, the Empire Express approached the bridge four miles east of the Norwich grade, at a town called New Lindstrom, and for some reason never slowed from her sixty-five miles an hour. Insomniacs awake and reading at that hour reported the usual thunder of the train. A few recalled how the noise never diminished. Then the screeching of metal and snapping and tearing, as the whole center span gave way and the Empire Express carried my cousin Cynthia into the dark, icy waters of the Chenango River, forever.

The Raccoon

Posted on by sterlingbennett

In 1946, on December 24th, it snowed all day and then all night. I was nine years old. My brother was ten and a half. My father liked to say we were almost twenty, put together. In the morning, we opened presents. First me, then my brother, then my father. I don’t remember what I got. Nor what my brother got. But I gave my father a small bottle with a raccoon embryo in it, floating in alcohol, about the size of a mouse. I had used my jackknife to cut it out of the mother that lay beside the road. She was too fresh to be bloated, and so I thought she had to be pregnant. There were four babies, but I only took one. The embryo was easy to see in alcohol. It’s eyes were closed. There was no fur, but the outline of colors, the black mask, brow and snout in white, the black tip of the nose, the dark grey body, and the ringed tail were all there, in perfect detail.

We sat by the fire to keep warm. It snowed so hard that it was dark outside, in broad daylight. My father held the jar up to the firelight and said the baby raccoon was a fine sight with the flames shining through around it. Then he made pancakes and sausage and we pulled the table over to the fireplace and ate there. He made us cocoa. He asked us if we liked our presents. He held up the raccoon every so often and said it was really something to look at.

My brother pouted. Now and then he glared at me. I think he resented the raccoon. Maybe because it was dead. Maybe because it was more meaningful to my father than the present he had given him. From time to time, the house shook when the big snowplow rumbled past. It came by often. As if it was afraid it wouldn’t be able to keep the road open. Finally, toward afternoon, it didn’t come by any more. And then there were no more cars. A little later, we got a call from my Uncle Lawrence, the town sheriff. He said the roads were closed, and he asked if we had enough wood and coal to keep us warm.

It snowed all that Christmas day.

And then it stopped. A full moon came out, and our father said we should go for a walk. My brother opened the front door and said the snow was too deep. My father said, we’d take the horse. And took us through the snow to the barn, holding us around waist, horizontal, like two little pigs, he said, and so we grunted and squealed accordingly, I think just to make him happy.

Our horse Freddy was surprised to see us. He whinnied. I thought in kind of a question. I took my knapsack along. I put the raccoon jar in it. My father pulled a stool up to Freddy, who stood patiently, curious to see what was going to happen. One by one, we got on. My father put me in front, then my brother, then he swung up behind.

We rode without a saddle. My father said that would be warmer. Freddy started forward and waded without effort through the deep moon-glinting snow. We went down the road through the center of town, under the dark maples and elms, past the candles in the windows. Past the dark shutters on the white houses. Past the dark wreaths. We looked down through windows and saw Christmas trees with electric candles on them. Doctor Crum, the German, had real candles on his tree, and his wife was right there beside him, with her arms around his waist.

Then we rode out into the center of the town square, equal distance from all the houses. We sat there, under the full moon, Freddy shifting first this way, then that way. My brother said he could see his breath. My father said he could see his, too. I took the jar out of my knapsack and held it up against the moon. That made the dark shape of the raccoon look cold and alone. My brother held me around the waist from behind. But he reached up and slowly pulled the bottle down from the moon. I obeyed his motion and put the jar away. Then my father reached one arm out past my brother and held me across the stomach with his big hand. Then came the other arm, and the other hand. And we sat that way, warm on Freddy’s back – for a long time. Long enough for my brother to begin to twitch and rest his head heavy against the back of my neck.

That night, we slept in my father’s bed with him. Long after he went to sleep, I heard my brother crying, softly enough not to wake my father. And I thought about the dead raccoon and the bottle, alone on the night table next to my head. And, with my eyes open and looking, I considered the dark corners of the room, where the moonlight didn’t quite reach – and never would. And then I think I fell asleep.

Napoleonic Law

Posted on by sterlingbennett

There are some who say that Napoleonic Law reigns in Mexico: i.e. the concept that one is just as likely guilty as innocent, until one proves one’s innocence. I thought that might be an urban legend or just a little comparative nationalist propaganda against Mexico. After all, what have we known about Mexico, right from the start, is what we learned from Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” – that Mexicans are all uneducated bandits out to cut your throat for stealing their gold.

To settle these matters, I looked up the Mexican Constitution of 1917, Article 20, Section V, which reads: “Se le recibirán los testigos y demás pruebas que ofrezca, concediéndosele el tiempo que la ley estime necesario al efecto y ayudándosele para obtener la comparencia de las personas cuyo testimonio solicite…”

One of the brightest young academics I know here in Guanajuato – in fact, one of the brightest I have ever known anywhere – read the sentence and pronounced it guilty, that is, grammatically wrong. In literal (tortured) English, the sentence would read something like this: “They will be received to him (the accused, or implicated) the witnesses and other proofs which he offers, giving him the time and help he needs to obtain the appearance of persons whose testimony he solicits.”

Something like that. A more conscientious scholar would establish a more flowing translation of this important passage. But it has been 91 years since the sentence was written, and I don’t have the document in front of me at this very moment.

I took the text to my Spanish teacher, person of much education and reading. I asked, “Is testigos, i.e witnesses, nominative or accusative?” Now, some people might despair at that question. I could have asked, “Is testigos the subject or the object of the sentence.” Even this formulation can cause hyperventilating.

My teacher, whom I will call Carolina, began to argue with me, and I with her. She is a lovely woman, and we care for each other a great deal. The quality that recommends her most is her explosive laughter when I read her a truly dumb joke from one of Por Caton’s daily columns in The A.M.

We reach a tentative grammatical truce, and switch to content. She contends that Article 20, Section 5 implies the presumption of innocence. My secret opinion is that it does not – merely that, in the language of 1917, using the abominable impersonal reflexive, “It will be granted to one the opportunity to call witnesses, gather evidence, and confront one’s accusers,” no matter how capricious, malevolent, frivolous, scheming and without merit the accusation. In other words, if someone decides to accuse you of something, you already find yourself in a limbo between guilty and innocent.

I use the words I have learned in order to preserve our friendship. I say, “Me rindo” – I offer my surrender. Right away she sees through my strategy, but accepts anyway.

At home, I write to higher authorities, two professors of Spanish at the university where I used to teach. I asked, “Is testigos the object or the subject of the sentence. One replies. She recounts the history of civil rights between the War of Independence and The Revolution. During those hundred years, one could not call witnesses or present evidence, let alone confront one’s accusers. She suggested I read John Reed about Mexican interest in Russian efforts to write a constitution at that time. She asked me if her reply had changed my thinking.

I wrote back, thanking her and saying what I had wanted to know was whether testigos was nominative or accusative, and that therefore, no she had not changed my thinking. I did not hear from her again. The other professor, an expert on language, did not reply at all. I wrote to my former German Department colleague. He is good in Spanish and deeply interested in the ins and outs of grammar. He did not write back.

I mentioned all this to my wife. I chose a poor time to ask her – before breakfast. She said, “First we have to establish a method for analyzing this sentence.” I had shown her the sentence. I mentioned my suspicion that our former colleagues might not know the answer to my question. I also told her I had to do several things immediately before some workers arrived. But she had already begun reading the sentence.

I am proud of my wife. She has terrier blood and does not let go. “I have to water my seedlings before the workers come,” I said, and left the room. She continued chewing on the sentence. Her field is philosophy, an area of studies that was once not entirely unrelated to philology. Friedrich Nietzsche is a good example of that combination. He was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24.

By now I was one story lower, on the patio, heading for the garden. She appeared in a French door. “Come back here!” she commanded. I could have said, “Me rindo.” But I know she wouldn’t have bought it. Plus, I had no intention of returning. “Take it then!” she said, and threw Article 20, Section V out the French doors, from the level above me.

The sheet of paper, with the impersonal reflexive construction and the unknown case of the word testigos fluttered downward like a lost feather, and onto the patio where I was standing. Her words hung in the air. The workers had just then filed in behind me and had witnessed – as testigos, witnesses – the charged moment, the accusatory tone of my wife, and me as the object of it. I decided to assume that the dignity of my age would protect me from any doubts they might have about my manhood.

I wrote my Mexican writing partner, a bright literary person, asking him the question that so many before him had not been able to answer. He wrote back:
El testigo
Del testigo
Al testigo
Al testigo
showing me that testigo could be any of four grammatical cases. He had declined the word, as if it had been Latin. I wrote back that I had wanted to know its function in the sentence from Article 20, Section 5. He replied that grammar was not one of his strengths.

The grammatical storm between me and my wife blew over quickly. I went on line and found a 40-page academic paper on the history of the impersonal reflexive construction. The astute writer concluded by saying it was still impossible to give a definitive explanation of how it worked. He mentioned scholars had been struggling with it for two hundred years.

That night, in bed, beside my sweet wife, looking for something soporific, I opened one of the books that, added to all the rest, threatens to collapses my night table. It was “Instrucciones para Vivir en México,” by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, a favorite son and rascal of Guanajuato. My heavy, slowly closing eyes moved down the page until they arrived at the bottom and took in the following short passage. “Vamos a suponer que a Veracruz, en vez de llegar Cortés, llegan los pilgrims,” Let’s assume that instead of Cortés arriving at Veracruz, it’s the pilgrims. It continued: “Mi impresión es que la cena de acción de gracias, en vez de comérsela los ingleses, se la hubieran comido los indios, y en vez de guajalote hubieran tenido pilgrim,” My impression is that the thanksgiving feast – rather than being eaten by the pilgrims – would have been eaten by the Indians, and that instead of turkey, the (the Indians) would have eaten pilgrim.

My eyes opened a little, but it was a false alarm. And I hope you will pardon the digression. It was a simple case of the reflexive, not even of the impersonal reflexive – and therefore not sleep disturbing. It was more like “Está para comersela,” “She’s a real dish,” and we’re doing the appreciating.

I showed the pilgrim example to my teacher, and we relished it as the Indians might have relished eating pilgrim at Veracruz.

I showed her another example, closer to the mark. “Did you know,” I said, “you can say either “Se vende naranjas” or “Se venden naranjas – the first verb singular, the second plural? The sentence, either way, means, there are oranges for sale.

We began to argue a little. About naranjas. About whether the first naranjas was the direct object of the sentence, the second the subject. I said I thought that was the case. She said it wasn’t. I am ten years older than her and tried to use that to my advantage, even though it’s her language and not mine. Which canceled out my age advantage. I decided to use my surrender tactic. I said, “Se me aceptará la explicación.” Or, in equally horrible English, “It will be accepted to me (your) explanation,” mirroring the dreadful style of Article 20, Section 5 of the Mexican Constitution – instead of simply, “I accept your explanation.”

She studied me for signs of frivolous ironic intent. While one eyebrow showed patience, the other flicked up in warning. She said, in my case, we might want to consider my behavior suspect until proven innocent.

I said, in my own defense, and to distract her, there was currently a full moon, and there was a male cat, black and white, which prowled over our property, along the garden walls and across the azotea, the roof, pissing and yowling all night long, waking the dead and making the place perpetually reek from his claim on our territory.

“What’s your point?” she said.

“Well,” I said, “the presumption of guilt lies heavily on him. I do not go howling and spraying where he lives.”

“I thought you were against Napoleonic Law,” she said.

“I was,” I said. “But” – and I said this in the style of the 1917 Constitution – “may to me the alley cat pisser he be trapped and the organs that make him howl and spray be deprived to him.”

“Did you know,” she replied, “that on February 27, 2008 the Mexican lower house and the senate introduced a reform that would introduce public open trials and the guaranteed presumption of innocence? The vote passed by 462 to 6. It is a constitutional amendment and now has to be approved in at least 17 of Mexico’s 31 states.”

I was speechless.

“How will that affect the cat? I asked.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” she said.

It had not turned out well. We had settled the grammar question, I think. We called testigos accusative, i.e. a direct object, in an impersonal reflexive, a construction, in my opinion, unworthy of any language at all. I had begun by feeling culturally smug about Mexico’s retrograde Napoleonic Law, which had remained in retrograde for over ninety years. And now this.

“But the cat is trespassing and destroying private property,” I said.

“The cat is not a person,” she said.

“Then the law doesn’t apply to it. There is no presumption of any kind,” I said.

“You won’t take his testicles?” she asked.

“It is not my intention,” I lied.

I went home and told my wife what my teacher and I had discussed.

“We will adopt him,” she said. “She is right.”

“What about?” I protested.

“About the presumption of innocence.”

“What about his testicles?” I squawked.

She gave me a quick seductive kiss. “We’ll only keep yours.”