XXVII

Locked behind a glass cabinet in the Archivo y Biblioteca Historicos of Vera Cruz, Mexico was a most curious manuscript relating the details of an interview between a Franciscan friar named Sebastian de Sabastades and a Spanish deserter named Jimenez Maldonado. It is dated in the Year of Our Lord 1570 when the recollections of this interview were finally recorded from memory to parchment in Latin and by way of an amanuensis, for the friar was on his death bed.

 
It was in 1559 that the fort of Santa Maria de Ochuse was first settled within Pensacola Bay by the Conquistador Tristan de Luna y Arellano and 1,500 Spanish settlers and soldiers. This colony met almost immediate misfortune when it was struck by a hurricane and its galleons were wrecked before they could be unloaded. So to spread their hungry mouths, the settlers split into groups led by captains and cast about deep up the wild pine country to hunt game. One such group included Fr. Sabastades, who tended the religious needs of his party. They trekked up the Escambia River into central Alabama and encountered few of the Pensacola Indians, who were mound builders. What they did encounter, however, had astonished them all, for a most haggard and grotesque man wandered into their camp. He was most delirious and was so terribly disfigured that Sabastades thought they might have stumbled upon a tribe of Blemmyes, which are mythical, headless humanoids from Nubia. Alas though, he spoke Castellan Spanish!

They settled the man down onto a straw mattress and gasped when they saw the gummata on his chest. The friar prayed for a healing hand from Our Lord Jesus Christ and proffered the man water, learning his name was Jimenez Maldonado. It seemed from his dire and evil affliction that he might expire soon. Realizing this, the friar sought to elicit the man's undoubtedly remarkable account.

 
Jimenez Maldonado was born in Segovia in the slums in the shadow of that great Roman aqueduct. He joined the army fighting the Italian Wars with pike and shot before enlisting with a company of adventurers going to the New World - Conquistadors. He enrolled in the expedition of Hernando de Soto and they marched deep into the interior of this mysterious continent searching for gold and to bring the Word of Jesus Christ to the heathens. They did this with cruel alacrity, burning and looting any village which defied the summons and demands of the Captain de Soto. They marched across a great barrier of mountains they called the Appalachians until they emerged into a wide valley stretching towards the southwest along the river called Kasquinampo. At night the men would gather around their campfires and tossed together the shell necklaces and polished stone beads they had purloined from the Indian villages along the way. They were deeply disappointed in what they had collected. There was scarcely any gold in all this junk.  

 
Gold is known to afflict the mind of men, causing them to carry out extraordinary deeds to gain it. And so the rumors of an entire city of gold, that legendary Cibola, afflicted the Conquistadors in different and passionate ways. Everyone was hoping to strike it rich with another Tenochtitlan or Cajamarca lurking in the depths of the New World. And so did it strike the imaginations of both Jimenez Maldonado and his friend Alonso de la Cabra, both being great adventurers from impoverish origins. They had sworn themselves to blood secrecy upon the revelation of a mighty chiefdom called the Koasati located on an island of the Kasquinampo. This they learned from an expiring Indian of that place, whose testimony had been translated by Alonso, who was a Taino mestizo experienced in the heathen tongues. And as Captain de Soto's expedition turned east and away from the great river chasing the legend of Cibola into the chiefdom of the Coosa, Jimenez and Alonso stole away into the night laden with supplies they had stolen from the company's larders.

They sailed down the Kasquinampo through a mighty, twisting gorge and into the land the Koasati, and were guided by them to the island they sought. It was a great disappointment to the two Conquistadors, who found not pyramids but mounds, and not gold but worthless shells and beads. Being intrepid adventurers as they were, they impressed the Koasati, who placed themselves under their protection, believing Alonso to be something of a god. And with this influence they became the masters of the Koasati, dispatching their new subjects into the interior to trade for gems and precious metals what Alonso and Jimenez crafted cleverly by hand. And when there were hostilities with the Koasati's neighbors, Alonso and Jimenez would lead them into battle brandishing sword and crossbow and the Armor of God. Alonso was made a cacique and crowned with feathers and worshipped as a deity by an amused Jimenez.

It could not be said with enough fullness how beautiful this country was when Jimenez and Alonso first arrived - sights that would never to be seen again even a decade hence. It was less than virgin, for it was still teeming with Indians then. They clustered around long houses and planted their fields with stalks of maize entwined by beans. They made extensive use of burning. Across the horizon could be seen the smoke of fires that the Indians tended to, clearing the underbrush among that great teeming, primeval forest. It improved their ability to kill game like elk, deer and bear. Trails were as wide as a wagon and crisscrossed these vast lands between salt licks and river fords and villages. All of this the natives of the New World had lived for thousands of years. And then it all began to unravel until the New World itself had been cast forever out of Paradise.

 
It started with the pigs. They were driven as meat-on-the-hoof by the Captain de Soto when many had gone feral and bred in the wild. Within a few years they were everywhere destroying crops. The Indians adapted to eating this strange creature. They had never seen anything with hooves before. Then came the plague. A devastating pestilence swept across the land within just a few years. Entire villages were wasted with the sick, whose skin turned black or burst with pustules. The Indians were dying so quickly that the dead could not be buried. Three out of four Indians perished in a plague that exceeded the most injurious acts of God recounted in the Holy Bible. The social and ecological upheaval this global calamity unleashed had opened a new epoch in natural and human history. The Lost World that Jimenez and Alonso had the fortune and good luck to bear witness to was dashed within the space of a decade. The vast network of trails wilted and grew overgrown. The forests grew thick with underbrush. Survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape forged new tribal kinships with other survivors.

 
And so it was that one of these new tribal kinships came to call themselves the Chicaza, or "Chickasaw." They attacked the Koasati on their island where Jimenez and Alonso still maintained their hegemony, albeit their chiefdom had suffered terribly under the plague. Jimenez himself had become afflicted with a disease which had ulcerated his body and was driving him into delusions. It had even begun to disfigure his face with gummata. He was unable to restrain his dear friend Alonso who rushed into the Chickasaw braves brandishing his sword of Damascus steel and crying "Santiago!" The Koasati were greatly disheartened by the loss of their cacique and surrendered themselves into bondage. The Chickasaw took over the island, which they renamed after their new tribe and settled upon it since.

 
Jimenez Maldonado was unharmed, but banished as an untouchable by the Chickasaw across the Kasquinampo where the rotting man made his way south towards Ochuse, which had been known since the Narvaez expedition of 1529. That is where after an incredible journey of survival on foraging Jimenez Maldonado had learned of the encampment of Fr. Sabastades and the others. The Lord had spared him just a few hours to recount this fantastic tale, which was so unbelievable to Fr. Sabastades that he thought not to record it. For he recognized the disease which had so disfigured Jimenez Maldonado as syphilis, a cruel wasting disease not known before to Europeans but was reported on by the Narvaez expedition. It was known to drive men mad with delusions and fantasy. The manuscript concluded with the death of Jimenez Maldonado and, incidentally, with the death of Friar Sabastades. He and the rest of the settlers of Santa Maria de Ochuse had abandoned their colony and returned to Vera Cruz, where the friar's account was recorded by the amanuensis just before his death.

 
And so it remained locked in a curio until it had been discovered by that autodidact of history and amateur antiquarian, Burnside Lee. He had taken leave from his duties with the company stockpiling supplies. They had been stacking crates and barrels in the plaza of Vera Cruz for General Scott's anabasis towards Mexico City, that original Cibola, when Burnside recognized a good library when he saw one. And with his rusty Latin, he examined this most amazing chronicle which the librarian, who appreciated classical learning, obliged him to. In doing so he had come to the stunning realization that Kasquinampo was the Tennessee River itself. And the island he was certain he recognized - Chickasaw Old Fields, otherwise known as Hobbs Island. And more shocking than all this was the final testimony of Jimenez Maldonado that he and Alonso de la Cabra had deposited the horde of their amazing little chiefdom into the grounds of that island.

 
Burnside Lee looked up. He looked from side to side from the table at which he had sat. And when he had seen that the librarian had gone to the lavatory, he looked askance at his own mores, but saw only a luster of gold. Then he rolled up the manuscript, tucked it into the tunic of his blue uniform, and bolted out the door back to his company.

XX

When he arrived in Mexico, Burnside Lee had never in his life imagined such a place. Before he ended up in the Land of Moctezuma, he had never been further away from his home in Limestone County than Nashville, Tennessee. That's where he swore his oath and he was given a rifle and told he was going to Mexico to fight Mexicans. He could not have been more eager. This was exactly what he needed - adventure to mollify a long bout of melancholia.

War with Mexico had been roundly supported by slaveholding Democrats, who wished to expand their extraordinary voting privileges into new lands where they could import slavery. George Smith Houston, that penultimate Greek of Limestone County, was then representing the Nickajack in Congress. He voted for the war after a pantomime speech, and then sat the rest of it out at home.

 
Burnside had long been a widower, having lost his first wife and child in childbirth years before. He kept his mind active by abjuring from alcohol and studying history. Longing for adventure to assuage his perpetual grief, he placed his hardware store on Jefferson Street in stewardship when war was declared against Mexico. Then he made the trip to Nashville to enlist in the army. There he was enrolled in the 1st Tennessee Regiment, which drew a wild swashbuckling type from here on to all over. Most of the soldiers thought this was the big ticket. Mexico! As far as Southerners were concerned, that place was next on Manifest Destiny's hitlist. Many of them thought they would get land in Mexico out of the deal, and recruiters weren't eager to dissuade them with the truth of it. There were so many volunteers that they couldn't take them all.

 
The army hit the beaches at Vera Cruz, Mexico and laid siege to its ancient walls of coral. They were cheerfully led by that old War of 1812 hero, General Winfield Scott, who was nicknamed "Old Fuss and Feathers." After capturing the ancient city, they marched inland into the jungle towards the distant mountains. They followed the old invasion route of the Conquistador Hernando Cortez. Burnside was amazed to observe jaguars and ocelots prancing among the babbling trees. There were birds that burst in carnivals of color, and there were tarantulas that grew as large as his fist. Spider monkeys would climb down and rob him at night of the fruit he foraged from the jungle. It was quite a remarkable encounter with the alien and exotic for just a boy from Limestone County!

They began to ascend the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Madre Orientale, where the wind blew like furies and the mornings were blanketed with frost. Somewhere up there in the mountains was the Mexican Napoleon, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was the butcher of the Alamo. He held a strong position with ten-thousand Mexican soldiers guarding the jagged defile of Cerro Gordo. In his first action, Burnside Lee's regiment was sent against the enemy's center. They blundered into a crossfire among the slopes of chapparal overlooking the gorge and tumbled back behind whatever defilade they could find.

 
This was a terrifying experience for Burnside Lee. This was not what he expected. Enemy musket fire barked through the scrubs with every volley. Fuego! Artillery smashed into the rocks sending shards everywhere. Curling with abject terror and having urinated himself, it took quite an effort for Burnside to pull himself back together again. It helped when an Irish sergeant kicked him in the ass screaming foreign obscenities and pulled him to his feet. Somehow he mustered the mental enterprise to fold himself back into the ranks and return fire. It was not until a bright young captain named Robert E. Lee had personally reconnoitered General de Santa Anna's left flank that the whole position could be turned. And when it had, the Mexicans suddenly broke. So calamitous was the retreat that the Mexican Napoleon left behind his wooden leg and wine chest. Both brought great glee and cheers to the American ranks.

 
Burnside Lee swore he would never go into combat sober again. The experience was entirely too suffuse with terrors surreal, too phantasmic. It wasn't worth the glory if he had to endure it. So he broke his embargo on spirits and around a campfire asked for a swill from another soldier named Luther Lang. He passed along a flask filled with hot bourbon that went down hard. Then they got to talking about where they'd come from.

Limestone County, Luther asked? Why I'm from Giles County, Tennessee. I reckon we're neighbors.
Luther eyed him queerly when Burnside said he was a Whig, as though he were untrustworthy. He asked him if he had slaves, which was a rude question. Two.

 
I've got eight, Luther said. He gazed quietly. I got my eyes set on becoming a grandee here. These people can work. They built pyramids! Unlike our n*****s, they understand a hierarchy. They understand class and racial distinction. Did you know they grade their mestizos based on how white or Indian they are? As far as I'm concerned, your either white, a redskin or a n****r. What a strange country this is. It will take some getting used to.

Burnside didn't know what to think of all that. It really took him aback.

 
I got me near 80 acres near Prospect, Tennessee. Say when this is over, we'll need to visit one another. Burnside thought not.

 
He noticed Luther thumbing his ring, and he thought to ask. Did he go to college?

 
No sir. That's the ring of Adelphon Kuklos. He took it off and tossed it to Burnside, who looked it over. A red jasper was inscribed with white gold letters - AK. Is this some fraternity, Burnside asked?
Yes sir, but not of the college type. We're a band of brothers... white brothers. Our aim is to spread white culture across the Western Hemisphere, to build an empire where white Americans of the South can prosper without the interference of those devilish Yankees. And that starts right here in Mexico. These people are a wasted and degenerate race, ripe for the picking.

 
Burnside was disturbed, but he let the man talk. And so he did into the evening about how Adelphon Kuklos was funding filibuster expeditions to undermine Hispanic governments around the Gulf and Caribbean. By installing white dictators, they could apply for statehood or otherwise thrive with the support of Southern slaveowning investors. It was a vast conspiracy, though none too secret. A lot of poor whites and yeomen were buying into it. A lot of them were there in Mexico. But Adelphon Kuklos seemed especially sinister in its organization.

 
Burnside was absorbed, and took his mental notes long into the night.