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On the sidewalk in front of him, a telescope man had set up for business: five cents for a five-minute look at the moon's craters and Saturn's rings. Tonight there was already a queue of people hoping to see GOD'S OWN ILLUMINATIONS, as the man's wooden sign promised. What a funny puff to peddle astronomy, Skaggs thought as he prepared to cross the street--when five drummers in Army uniforms stepped directly in front of him. He had accidentally bumped the nearest man.
"Oops, pardon me," he said, and only then noticed behind the drummers a whole band. They were silent but for the soft stomping of their boots as they marched in place. And then, they moved forward into Broadway and began playing Yankee Doodle so loudly that Skaggs was blown backward. He thumped his right elbow against a bystander's belly--and as he jerked away and prepared to apologize, accidentally brushed his left hand across the lightly upholstered buttocks of the man's young wife.
Modern America: artificially aglow, preternaturally loud--and unreasonably crowded. Then Skaggs remembered why. Tonight was the peace festival, to celebrate our crushing of Mexico: the bands and General Winfield Scott and some of his New York troops marching up Broadway from the Battery and, by order of the mayor, the illuminations, a patriotic obligation for all New Yorkers to stick candles on windowsills, twist open the valve on every gas lamp, carry candles, wave torches, build bonfires--that is, to come as close as possible to burning down the city without actually setting it afire.
In the short pause after the first verse of Yankee Doodle, Skaggs heard another familiar tune insert itself. He turned and saw that behind him, marching out of Worth, another regimental band had appeared, playing one of the inescapable songs of the moment, Strike for Your Rights, Avenge Your Wrongs.
As the band reached the last bars of its first verse, pedestrians began shouting the words and clapping along in time.
Felt Mexico's foul tyranny,
Upon the Rio Gran-dee!
More voices joined in on the chorus:
Sing to the Rio Gran-dee,
The rolling Rio Gran-dee,
Our foe shall bow the knee!
Almost none of the citizens knew any of the lyrics except the chorus and final lines of each verse. All the words that people had memorized, and now gloried in shouting out, were the angry ones, the ones that smelled of bile and gunpowder and blood.
Skaggs watched a group of girls tossing bouquets at the survivors of New York's decimated Second Regiment. One of the men stopped to pick up a hyacinth and place it in his musket barrel when a large bomb detonated in the sky--followed shortly by a second, smaller explosion. The soldiers and the girls and everyone else in the street stopped and smiled and looked south.
The fireworks were going up from the Battery. Skaggs adored fireworks, and these days the displays were beyond brilliant--not the pale flashes and pops of his childhood, but reds and blues and greens burning in apocalyptic splendor. At one astounding bloom of purple, he cooed along with the rest of the crowd on Broadway.
Artificially glowing, artificially noisy, artificially jolly America ... and in these protean times, it occurred to Skaggs as he stared at the fire in the sky, modern artifices turn from toy to tool to toy and back again: gas lamps had begun as theatrical gewgaws before they became street fixtures, just as weapons of war had been turned by the pyrotechnicians into entertainments.
He hustled back toward West Broadway, against a column of people holding tiny star-spangled banners on foot-long sticks, all eager to join the bloody-minded festival of peace.