Mexico (80 page)

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

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

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

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

"General Early, what happened to him?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Whose orders?"

"Benito Juarez."

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

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

"Must we remain outside the city?"

"You must."

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

"Of course, but for what purpose?"

"To see what's happening."

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

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

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

"Are you one of the firing squad?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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