MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  Reverend Harding and his wife, Dorothy, had come to the Philippines at the turn of the century, not long after Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay. Public health officials, doctors, teachers, swarmed into the conquered archipelago, determined to demonstrate America’s ability to transform what it had captured. Many stayed in Manila, a city Harding despised. To him, Manila was a feudal, popish place, where Catholicism had festered for four centuries, where illustrados, the Hispanic elite, all lace and rosary, sent their offspring to Madrid to marry, and where businessmen now rushed to proclaim themselves Americanistas, vowing to serve the newcomers with the same obsequious zeal they had bestowed upon the Spaniards. Harding made his way north, into the mountains of the central Cordillera. Here, among primitive tribes, Igorots, he found a place more to his liking. Many Americans were attracted to the mountains, cool, green realms, underpopulated, unmapped, un-Catholic, Indian country, really. A doctor, a miner, a botanist, anthropologist, or missionary could make his mark here. He settled in Sagada, a collection of mountain huts, winding lanes, shady pine groves, flowered meadows, rice paddies: a Shangri-La. Harry Roberts Harding was born in Sagada in 1923. He still thought of it as home. “I was born in the mountains,” he said.

  What would you call the impulse that sends a man who already dwells in an isolated mountain village on months-long solitary treks even farther into the Cordillera? Was he aloof? Was he lonely? Proud? Shy? Did Elbert Hubbard Harding choose to be what he was, or did he have no choice? He occupied himself with a series of monographs on the natural history of the mountain provinces, monographs he published locally at his own expense, cheap watery printing on paper that was worse than newsprint, bound with covers that looked like shopping bags.

  Luckily, Hubbard was the first missionary to Sagada. The Igorots had no basis for comparison or complaint. They accepted this distant eccentric as the very model of what a missionary should be: a cordial, distant, nocturnal creature.

  Dorothy Harding saved the situation. She was the one who learned local languages; organized native weavers, carvers, farmers; opened a school, dispensary, and guest house; operated the radio that linked Sagada to Manila and the world. Her husband was American mysticism and spiritual loneliness. She was American ingenuity, improvisation, hustle and bustle.

  In 1937, Dorothy Harding accompanied her son back to Georgia, where he was enrolled in a private preparatory school outside of Savannah, his mother’s hometown. It was a wrenching change, from the hills of never-never land to the pranks and discipline of a military-oriented boarding school. Harding felt as if he was being punished for he didn’t know what, unless it was the happiness of Sagada. He thought about that. Maybe happiness was something that had to be paid for by punishment. More punishment than expected: he had been in school a month when his mother was killed in an automobile accident.

  Elbert Hubbard Harding’s wife had lain underground all winter before the first letter came from Sagada, a note penciled on the cheap paper that reminded him of home, a note replete with the same pro-forma pieties his father dispensed—though only when forced to—in funerals at Sagada. No, his father wasn’t coming to the rescue, that much was clear. He’d have laughed at the idea of rescue, he’d ask what it meant, how it was defined, if anyone really believed such a thing was possible and then, when his son was all tangled up and tongue-tied, he’d have gone for a walk someplace. So Harry Roberts Harding resolved to be the architect of his own deliverance, beating the military school at its own game, finishing in three years what was meant for four. On the way home, on the train across America, the Pan Am Clipper to Manila, the car to Baguio, the hitchhike truck to Bontoc, the hike up the trail from the Chico River to Sagada, he pictured his confrontation with his father. Then came the end of the climb, the trail curving into pine groves, the first glimpse of the rice terraces that fed the village, centuries-old dikes and pools that took his breath away and told him he was home. And then: the first incredulous waves from the people who remembered him, woodcutters, weavers, farmers who waded out of the fields, kids who trailed him, shouting and cheering through the village to the gate, the garden, the home that was empty. His father, as usual, was someplace else.

  Young Harding camped out in dust, dead plants, fallen-apart furniture, and filthy kitchen. His father appeared to have confined himself to his laboratory. Here, at least, there were signs of life: pencil shavings, pipe cleaners, clothing that was soaking—no, marinating—in buckets. These were his welcome home. In a few days, his nature—and his mother’s—asserted itself. The house was cleaned, the roof fixed, the garden weeded and watered. The villagers noticed. Before long, they were stopping by with the same problems they had brought his mother, the same rotted-out teeth, skin infections, letters that needed writing, shipments to and from the market down at Bontoc. It was on coming back from Bontoc, laden with powdered milk and razor blades, bottles of aspirin and bolts of cloth, that he saw his father. The old man must have just come back from wherever he had been. Pick and knapsack on his back, he was looking around the yard his son had recaptured from the wilderness, less pleased than puzzled, as though he might have gotten his home address wrong.

  “So,” said Elbert Hubbard Harding. “You’re back.”

  “Yes,” Harry replied. He had thought this would be a moment to remember. He was wrong.

  “I saw . . .” the elder Harding remarked, gesturing toward the garden. “I let things go. Couldn’t seem to find the time for gardening.”

  “Or writing,” Harry charged.

  “Yes,” he conceded. “That too.”

  “You got the letter I sent. I know that. It’s inside. You didn’t answer.”

  “No, sorry. It’s how I am. That’s all.”

  No, Harding thought, the moment he’d been hoping for would never come. He wanted it. Love or hate, it didn’t matter. But love had a way of tumbling into affection, familiarity, and hate into mere disappointment. His father reached out a hand, a weak ecclesiastical handshake.

  “Nice to have you back, son. Shall we go in?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Up in the mountains. You know. One of my walks . . .”

  “I mean . . .” A last stab at meaning. “Where have you been all these years?”

  “Oh. That.” He took the question seriously, turned it over some. And when the answer came it was a surprise to both of them, a bona fide discovery. “Up in the mountains.”

  “Could I go with you sometime?”

  “Of course,” his father said. “But don’t they need you here at the mission?”

  “They can spare me. They spared you.”

  “Spared me?” The old missionary was taken aback. He’d never looked at things that way, never evaluated his performance. “Why, yes . . .”

  He was laughing. It was the first time Harry Harding had seen his father laugh.

  “Why, yes . . . I suppose they have.”

  In the end, his father was a mystery he never solved. The old man fussed with plans for what he called, ironically perhaps, “the father-and-son expedition.” Sometimes he seemed to take it seriously, poring over maps, marking trails, springs, campsites, and such. Those maps were his father’s finest works, Harding saw: hand-drawn, carefully marked and annotated, with comments front and back. But the father-and-son expedition was canceled.

  “I’m not getting up,” Elbert Hubbard Harding announced one morning. He was on a cot in his laboratory. During the night, he’d moved his writing table, his smoking tools, his washbasin and bucket closer to the bed, which was covered with books and maps.

  “You’re not getting up today?”

  “Or tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t move my legs. That’s why. Or feel them.”

  “The doctor down in Bontoc—”

  “Don’t waste his time. I’m staying here. That’s final.”

  “You want me to radio Manila, at least?” Mission headquarters was in Manila. A nightly radio net linked
various Episcopal outposts.

  “They’ve got better things to do in Manila,” he said. “At least they think they have. Let’s not disturb them.”

  Harding looked up at his son. He was surprised to see frustration and hurt. And mourning.

  “They’ll never take me alive,” he joked, patting his son’s hand.

  The old man sank steadily during the next two weeks, declining food, shunning what few medical palliatives the mission offered. He slept a lot. “Testing the waters on the other side,” he called it. “Practicing oblivion.” Meanwhile, the nightly broadcasts from Manila crackled with tension between America and Japan. Young Harding thought that America might have to teach the Japanese a lesson, sooner or later. “Take them down a notch or two.” He said as much one night and was irritated by his father’s silence. If the prospect of a war did not concern him, what would?

  “Do you think there’ll be a war?” he pressed. His father had had a good day, which meant he had died at a slower rate today than yesterday. It was like watching him go down a flight of steps, some large, some small. Sometimes he took them two at a time, sometimes he paused and looked around. He thought about his father a few years later, at dawn, at a place called Los Banos, when he watched General Tomoyuki Yamashita go up the steps to the gallows where his life was ended.

  “A war?”

  “Yes, damn it, a war!”

  Old Harding had been working on his maps, transferring comments from recent journals to the map margins, updating his cartography of a world he’d never see again.

  “A war.” It sounded as if someone had asked him about the weather. It even looked that way: the old man glanced outside, as if he could find his answer in the stars.

  “Do you think we’ll win?”

  “Who’s we? This ‘we’ you’re talking about.”

  “Our side. The Americans and Filipinos. Why do you always force me to define terms?”

  “It’s a good exercise for you. Knowing who I is. And we. And they. Think about it.”

  “Every question I ask, the ones that I wait for years to ask, they come out sounding stupid. You’re going to die. . . . And we’re going to be strangers.”

  “Yes.” It seemed like a perfectly normal proposition to the old man! Yes, of course he was dying. Yes, they were strangers. Everything in natural order. But some of his son’s frustration must have touched him, because he put aside his maps and looked at him carefully.

  “You’ll get to know me, Harry.”

  “What? When you’re dead?”

  “Exactly. You’ll see. You know who I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been lying here? Or who comes to me in dreams these nights? My father. I’m here in a mountain village in the middle of a country that’s going to war, and I’m thinking about someone who died in 1918. My father. I didn’t know him. At least I thought I didn’t. Just like you. It runs in the family, I suppose. But here I am. All full of him. I wouldn’t call it a miracle. But it’s remarkable. The company of the dead . . .”

  “What about me?”

  “You’ll think of me, years from now. The oddest things will bring me back to you. I don’t know, the smell of wood fires, or something you do while shaving, or the sound of someone whistling. It’s the way lives overlap.”

  “I might not live that long.”

  His father picked up his maps. “That’s what I’ve been working on . . .”

  They buried him the way they buried all the village people: not at all. The Igorots came to the mission with a coffin that had been carved out of a tree trunk. They lifted his father inside, closed the top, wrapped some rope around, and carried him out the mission gate. In the front garden, the American flag was flying on a pole set in a bed of roses his mother had planted. It hung limp and motionless like an inverted mop. Harding unfastened the guide ropes and brought the flag down. On the road the Igorots watched carefully: a housekeeping chore suddenly became a ceremony. Harding grasped the flag by its ends, careful that it didn’t touch the ground. Then, with a military-school flourish, he folded it over and again, crisp deft folds that resulted in a three-cornered tricolor, which he exhibited to the people of Sagada, then tucked inside his knapsack. Thus ended forty years of American stewardship in the mountains. He wondered what it would be like for whoever came next, following in his father’s footsteps. No act could be a hard act to follow.

  The whole village marched off the road, down a steep and slippery trail that led toward the burial caves. Everyone was there, Harding saw, the pious converts, the “rice Christians,” the die-hard animists. That surprised him. His mother was the one who saved lives, yet his father--the world’s worst missionary—was the one they revered. (“Why haven’t we got more Episcopalians?” a no-nonsense inspector had asked. “They wouldn’t like it,” the old man replied.)

  Now they wrestled his coffin down into a limestone ravine, pallbearers sliding through mud, tripping over roots, scraping against rock outcrops, and then, at bottom, struggling upward toward the dark mouth of the cave, as if forcing a morsel of food up into the jaw of an unwilling monster, pressing the coffin between its stalactite incisors, among rotted out coffins, broken bones, the detritus of other lives, past feedings. At the front of the cave, the pallbearers stopped, maybe just to rest, but it felt like another one of those awkward moments that Harding was expected to fill with words and rituals. He stepped over toward the coffin and stood beside it, his hand on the wood. After a moment, he dropped his hand and stepped away. A meaningless gesture, but everyone else who was there stepped forward, put a hand on the coffin, stood silent, and moved on.

  They could have left the coffin near the mouth of the cave, where other recent coffins had been deposited, but they clambered onto a ledge that led farther in. The dead were all around them now. Some coffins had opened, revealing curled, desiccated remains, their posture in the coffin the same as in the womb. Did they believe, did anyone, that they would rise and walk again, here or somewhere else? They left his father on the highest, inmost corner of the cave.

  Harding walked back through the village, past the mission, out of Sagada, through rice fields and wildflower meadows, through bamboo thickets and mountain streams, uphill into forests of teak and banyan, and when he came to the end of what he knew, he found a trail his father had marked for him, and he followed it into the mountains, toward Baguio and a man named Harrison Wingfield.

  CHAPTER 11

  Harrison Wingfield had come to the Philippines right after mustering out of the American Expeditionary Force in France. His superior, General Pershing, had cut his teeth fighting Moslem rebels in the Philippines and Wingfield credited the general with “pointing me in the right direction.” The direction—as always, with Americans—was west, far past the borders of the closed frontier, eight thousand miles across the Pacific, to a place Wingfield nonetheless regarded as part of America. Not a commonwealth, not a colony, but “territory.” His territory, and America’s. He’d done well out in the watery west. He owned gold mines in the mountains, rice plantations down below. He sat on the board of a half dozen companies that brewed beer, repaired ships, printed schoolbooks, assembled radios.

  Baguio was his headquarters. That made sense. Believing he was still in America, he lived as if he had never left home, in that part of the Philippines that most resembled the country he had left behind, the cool, piney summer capital where like-minded Americans had built a town almost from scratch, with good roads named after presidents, and sensible buildings that could have fit a Midwestern county seat, and a municipal park that Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago’s Midway, had designed. From the lecture halls and dormitories of the Philippine Military Academy—”our West Point”—to the barracks and officers club of Camp John Hay, Baguio was an American place, Harrison Wingfield its first citizen. But he thought of himself, or at least encouraged others to think of him, as plain old Uncle Harrison. His polished verandah was just a front porch, his sloping lawns a mighty good place for Easter egg hunts, his
gleaming banisters a playground slide. “He’s got his countries wrong, he’s got his centuries wrong,” Harding’s father had said, “but he gets his numbers right, your Uncle Harrison.”

  They were not related. Harrison Wingfield was everybody’s uncle. But it had always seemed to Harding that Wingfield took a particular interest in him. Wingfield always arranged for the missionary boy to visit Baguio twice a year, several weeks at a time. For a while, Harding suspected Wingfield might be interested in his mother, who accompanied him. In a way, he courted her. But the jealous son was courted also, and before long he came to believe that his mother’s flowers were like his own horseback rides, free-will gifts. If anyone was Wingfield’s target it was the ever-absent Elbert Hubbard Harding. Uncle Harrison had taken it upon himself to make up for all the missionary’s faults and defaults. Elbert Harding was someone he strove to atone for.

  Baguio days. That was how Harding thought of them, and always would. A special time, Christmas and summer vacation combined. Baguio days were scented, carefree, companionable days. Baguio days meant wide porches and polished floors, carpets of lawn, lemonade gazebos swarming with hibiscus, swims in hot springs and horseback rides to gold mines and trips to the market with Uncle Harrison, where piles of strawberries were his for the asking. Leathery libraries and dark wood and warm blankets at night and white uniformed servants and rides with Uncle Harrison in a 1934 white convertible Packard roadster that was the twin of President Quezon’s. Baguio days. Childhood and peacetime. Over now.

  “Mr. Harding, sir,” the servant announced.

  “That you, Elbert?” Wingfield asked, peering outward. The sun was setting behind where Harding stood, dropping into the Lingayen Gulf. The Japanese navy was there, where the sun was setting, and though it was only the sunset that made Wingfield raise his hand to shield his eyes, it looked as though he was warding off an attack from the west.