Songs of the Dead Read online

  What would have happened to European civilization— to this whole wétiko culture—if, for example, Columbus had turned back on his first voyage, as many of his men wanted? The trip was far longer than anyone—including Columbus— had anticipated. To keep his crew from mutinying, Columbus kept two logs: one known only to him, showing the accurate distance traveled each day; and one grossly underreporting to his crew the distance they’d traveled from Europe. What if his deception hadn’t worked? It almost didn’t. By October 10, the only way Columbus could keep his crew from mutinying was by promising that if they didn’t sight land within two days they’d turn back. Well, we all know what happened October 12, and we all know why October 12 is a day of celebration for wétikos and a day of mourning for everyone else. How would the world look today had the crew made their demands one day sooner? What if the currents on which the ships rode had been one day slower, the land one day farther away? What if the crew had known that Columbus would steal not only from those whose land they “discovered,” but from them as well?

  Or what if Columbus hadn’t landed at what is now called Hispaniola, had not first encountered the Arawaks, of whom he wrote, “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”? What if instead the wétikos would have first encountered a more warlike group of people, a group of people ready to defend themselves, ready to kill Columbus and crew to the last man? What if Columbus had never returned to Europe? How long would it have been before any crown repeated the folly of spending so much money to send someone to sail so far to the west? Would it have happened before Europe entered an irreversible and hopefully terminal decline?

  When Hernando Cortés invaded what is now Mexico with only six hundred men, twenty horses, and ten small cannons, what would have happened had the inhabitants of the region not had long-held myths that told them of fair-skinned gods coming from the east in sailing ships? Who gave them those myths? Who taught them those lessons, lessons which would destroy them? What would have happened had Cortés not found Indian nations with whom he could ally against the Aztecs (only to subjugate these others once their usefulness had passed)? What if these Indians had slaughtered him on the beaches, as he later slaughtered them in their homes and streets, in mines, in forests, plains, deserts, hills?

  The Europeans could not have conquered the Americas without the assistance of smallpox and other diseases, introduced both intentionally and accidentally. How different would the world look today if the Indians would not have been wiped out by these diseases? Would we be experiencing worldwide ecological collapse had the Europeans not given but received smallpox, carried it back home with them, had the civilized and not the indigenous suffered from its effects, and thus had the Europeans not been able to steal the resources and the land of those in the western hemisphere?

  Something as insubstantial as fog saved Hitler’s life. Something as short as a single day, something as small as a virus, saved European civilization from crashing.

  Not only had those in Germany and on the Western Front tried to kill Hitler. Many assassination attempts originated in Army Group Center, which formed the hub for resistance on the Eastern Front. Key to this resistance was senior operations officer Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow. Unable to abide meanness or injustice, his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime was both deep and consistent. In 1939 he told a fellow conspirator that “both duty and honour demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National-Socialism.”

  He worked tirelessly. He organized, cajoled, delegated, he gathered and experimented with explosives, he recruited people for attacks on Hitler.

  Not all of the attacks went anywhere. Sometimes Hitler was saved, not because of luck or the help of some God, but because of scruples. In early 1943, Georg Freiherr von Boeselager, known as one of the Army’s best pentathletes, joined the opposition. Tresckow asked Boeselager if he could kill Hitler with a single pistol shot. Boeselager responded he had the technical skill, but wasn’t sure he had the nerves. It’s one thing, he said, to kill an anonymous enemy on the field of battle, and quite another to kill someone you can recognize. This is often true, it seems, even if you recognize that killing the one person will save millions of others. He did not carry out an attack.

  Later that year a group of twelve officers determined that together they would kill Hitler during a briefing on the horrendous military situation on the Eastern Front. This attempt had to be abandoned because one of those present would have been Field Marshall von Kluge. It was necessary to inform Kluge so he could stay out of the way. Kluge disallowed the attempt because of the risk to senior officers (including himself ) and because, he said, it was not seemly to shoot a man at lunch.

  About this same time, General Hubert Lanz and Colonel Graf von Strachwitz made plans to use Strachwitz’s Grossdeutschland Panzer Regiment to arrest Hitler the next time he came to the Eastern Front to speak with Field Marshall von Weichs. Lanz and Strachwitz were fully prepared to kill Hitler if, as expected, his police, SS, and army bodyguards resisted. By the time Hitler came east for a conference, however, circumstances had forced Weichs to move his headquarters away from Poltava, where Strachwitz’s regiment was billeted, to Saporozhe, too far away for Strachwitz to be able to move without raising alarms. Thus that plan came to nothing.

  Hitler’s life was saved on that trip not only by the movement of Weichs’s headquarters, but by another providential occurrence. While Hitler was in Saporozhe, Russian tanks made a sudden—and coincidental—thrust toward the town. The tanks were only two hours away when Hitler’s driver became aware of the threat, and drove from the airport into town to get Hitler. They returned to the airport as quickly as they could and boarded their planes. As they took off they saw Russian tanks just sitting at the end of the airfield. The only reason the tanks had not attacked, trapping Hitler deep inside Russia, is that they’d run out of fuel.

  “What do I want?”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  “I want to stop the wétikos.”

  “It’s what I want, too.” Silence. Then, “But in the meantime. . . .”

  “I want to not be so scared.”

  “Is there someone you could talk to?”

  “Like a shrink? They’d look at me like the fucking cop, presume I’m delusional, and try to resolve whatever childhood trauma led to this disorder. Or even worse, they’d believe me: would you want to trust your psyche to the sort of psychologist who’d believe a story like this?”

  “No, someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s the problem. I have no idea. I don’t even know what you want from me. I’m glad to just hold you when you get scared if that’s what you want. Or. . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that what you want will help determine whom you should talk to. If you want the dislocations to stop there’s probably someone who can help. If you want to learn to cope with them, maybe you talk to someone else. If you want to learn how to ride them—if possible—then maybe it’s someone else again.”

  Images from the dislocations rise up in my mind. I ask myself exactly what about them terrifies me. “It’s not being out of control,” I say. “When I fell through time and saw us making love, I was delighted. It makes me happy to see the salmon, at least for the time I’m there. Now that I know—or at least feel confident—that I’ll come back, the dislocations themselves don’t terrify me. Inconvenience me, sure. But terrify, no.”

  “What terrifies you?”

  I see Nika. I see the rose blooming on the man’s chest. I see the look on the horse’s face as her child is killed. I hear men laughing. I see the hammer rise and fall. I hear the man say vagina. I hear the man say kill.

  B
ut then I also see glaciers melting. I see driftnets. I see long-line trawlers. I see clearcuts. I see chainsaws. I see vivisection labs and factory farms. I see plastics. I remember why Allison did not like to be told she is beautiful. I think of the other women I know who’ve been raped. None of these require I fall through time. They merely require I not look away.

  “I want,” I say, “to stop the wétiko culture.”

  “Then that means,” she responds without hesitation, “you need to talk to someone else entirely.”

  It’s late that night. The room is dark. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is a flash of lightning joining cloud to cloud. I sleep, then awaken to thunder so loud and so insistent I think someone is knocking on the window. I look without rising, and there’s no one there but more lightning, and more, and more thunder, and more. I do not go back to sleep, but sit partway up to watch and listen and to let the lightning and thunder fill me as I wait alone in the room with Allison asleep next to me.

  fifteen

  miracles

  I go to the library. One of my favorite parts of being a writer is getting to be in a library and calling it work. The library is at Gonzaga University. It’s beautiful, except there is a sculpture of Bing Crosby—abuser of wife and children—that I walk past to get here.

  I fall through time once or twice as I walk through the stacks. Or maybe stumble is better, since I see only flashes before coming back to the present. I see myself. I’m sitting on the floor in the stacks, surrounded by books, holding an open book in my lap, crying. The book—I see as well as remember—has photos of children as young as three and four and five forced to work in textile mills, coal mines, brickmaking factories.

  And now I’m back, almost walking into a coed who’s wearing too-tight blue jeans and a too-tight white t-shirt. I step around her and stumble again, this time seeing myself in a different row, reading different books, these on the European conquest of North America.

  Today I’m hoping to read an account of the systematic genocide perpetrated against the indigenous of Europe by the civilized between, say, the beginning of the current era and 1500, sort of an earlier European version of American Holocaust or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Maybe something called Bury My Heart in Saxony. Of course it’s the same story I mentioned earlier, the modus operandi of the dominant culture. It was true two hundred years ago, it was true two thousand years ago, and it’s true today. Just yesterday I read, “Deep in the Amazon rainforest a small tribe of uncontacted Indians is on the run, fleeing chainsaws and bulldozers as logging companies penetrate their forest home. They shun all contact with outsiders. They are fighting for their very survival. If urgent measures are not taken to protect them and their land from this invasion, they will disappear forever. That this is genocide is indisputable. Very little is known about the tribe, commonly referred to as the Rio Pardo Indians, who live on the border of Mato Grosso and Amazonas states. They may be the last survivors of their people, or they could be related to one of several neighbouring tribes who nickname them ‘Baixinhos’ (the tiny people) or ‘Cabeças vermelhas’ (the red heads). Since the 1980s, sightings and rumours have abounded. Arara Indians, who live in the area, report hearing them at night near their villages, mimicking the sounds of animals. Settlers and miners in the area have come across their abandoned houses. The government’s Indian Affairs Department FUNAI has disturbing evidence that the heavily armed loggers are hunting down the Indians. One field worker told Survival, ‘The loggers are going to clean out the Indians. They will just shoot them to kill them.’” The day before, I read an article about the destruction of different Indians that had the pull quote: “‘They killed my mother, my brothers and my sisters, and my wife.’ Karapiru Awá, survivor of a massacre.” The article: “Unless the Brazilian government, the World Bank and the mining company CVRD take urgent action, uncontacted Awá Indians in Brazil could soon be wiped out.” A couple hundred years ago the Shawnee Chiksika pretty much summed up this pattern when he said, “The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”

  I want to find a book that will help me understand how the Europeans became subsumed into the cannibal culture. Walking down a row I see one that looks slightly promising: The Barbarian Conversion From Paganism to Christianity, by Richard Fletcher. At least it’s the right subject. I know I’m in trouble, however, as soon as I open it: the author dedicates the book to his late mother, thanking her, for among other things, encouraging him to be a regular church-goer. At least he doesn’t try to hide his prejudices.

  I spend the afternoon there in the stacks reading the book. I’m simultaneously disappointed and blown away.

  My disappointment is the same one I used to feel when I’d watch cowboy and Indian movies, the same one I feel today when I read newspaper accounts of U.S. invasions: the authors’ heroes are so often my villains, and their villains are my heroes.

  In this book, the Catholics—the civilized—are the heroes, not the committers of genocide. One of the results of this is that the role of the sword in the “barbarian” “conversion” gets de-emphasized, and the g-word—genocide—doesn’t get mentioned at all. The author can’t, of course, avoid all mention of the sword, but he allows his language only to hint at the impact, as when he calls without much elucidation the Christian conquest of Saxony a “precedent” for “ugly episodes” in sixteenth-century Mexico.

  I stand, return to the row where I once sat reading about the conquest of the Americas, and see myself again through the years. I look closely at myself, sitting in corduroys and flannel shirt, clean but disheveled hair down to my collar, face unshaven. The me on the floor glances up, looks right through me, and I wonder how many of us ever get to see ourselves unselfconsciously. I hold that moment, treasure it, look at myself as I would look at anyone else I love. And then the vision fades. I step to where I was sitting, and pick up one of the books I read before.

  I shake my head to clear it, to return fully to the present, and think again about that author’s language. I think about ugly episodes; an argument with Allison where she and I both fought unfair; yelling at the cat because she peed on my handwritten notes for the next section I was writing; snapping at my mom over an entirely imagined slight. Those are the real ugly episodes.

  I open the book in front of me, flip through it, find examples of what this apologist for genocide calls “ugly episodes” from sixteenth-century Mexico. Ugly episodes. Cortés sent a “peace” delegation to the Aztecs, who welcomed them with songs. In the midst of the celebration, according to the sixteenth-century historian Bernardino de Sahagún, “The first Spaniards to start fighting suddenly attacked those who were playing the music for the singers and dancers. They chopped off their hands and their heads so that they fell down dead. Then all the other Spaniards began to cut off heads, arms, and legs and to disembowel the Indians. Some had their heads cut off, others were cut in half, and others had their bellies slit open, immediately to fall dead. Others dragged their entrails along until they collapsed. Those who reached the exits were slain by the Spaniards guarding them; and others jumped over the walls of the courtyard; while yet others climbed up the temple; and still others, seeing no escape, threw themselves down among the slaughtered and escaped by feigning death. So great was the bloodshed that rivulets ran through the courtyard like water in a heavy rain. So great was the slime of blood and entrails in the courtyard and so great was the stench that it was both terrifying and heartrending. Now that nearly all were fallen and dead, the Spaniards went searching for those who had climbed up the temple, and those who had hidden among the dead, killing all those they found alive.”

  Ugly episodes. Cortés: “I resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn and do all the harm we could . . . and we fell upon a huge number of pe
ople. As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach. . . .”

  Ugly episodes. Cortés and other Spaniards enslaved Indians and sent them to work on plantations and in mines. They killed them faster than they could be replaced, even at a cost of seven pesos each.

  Ugly episodes. In about a century the Spaniards reduced the population of the Tepehuán people by 90 percent, the Irritilla by 93 percent, the Acaxee by 95 percent, the Mayo peoples by 94 percent.

  Ugly episodes. I see Indians chained together at the neck, being led to mines. I see Spaniards decapitating them if they slow. I see Spaniards cutting off women’s breasts. I see Indian babies being killed and used as roadside markers. I see Spaniards cutting off Indians’ hands and noses, then stringing these dismembered parts around their necks and sending them home. I see Spaniards throwing “pregnant and confined women, children, old men, as many as they could capture,” into pits packed with spikes, so that the Indians are “left stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled.” I see that, in the words of one contemporary, “The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. . . . Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.” I see Spaniards testing the sharpness of their swords on the bodies of Indian children, and I see them tearing infants from their mothers’ arms to feed to their dogs.