Dead Letters: The Border

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

In December 1913, I was in El Paso covering the border for a wire service. The Mexican Revolution was in its third year. Pancho Villa had taken Ciudad Juárez. The streets of El Paso were full of journalists, arms dealers, refugees, and men whose occupations fell somewhere between all three. It was the kind of assignment where the story changed every hour and the correspondents drank every night, and I was no exception.

I was in a cantina on South El Paso Street — the name is lost to me, though the smell is not — when a man sat down at my table without being invited. This happened frequently in El Paso at the time and usually ended in a request for money or a fight or both. This man did neither. He ordered a whiskey, looked at me with the flat appraisal of someone who has decided you are not interesting but will do, and said, "You're a correspondent."

It was not a question. I confirmed it anyway.

"Then you can buy me a drink," he said. "Correspondents can always afford one more drink. It's the only thing your profession has over mine."

He was old — seventy-one, I would later learn — but he did not carry his age like a burden. He carried it like a weapon he was tired of maintaining but not yet willing to put down. His hair was white. His moustache was enormous. His eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen, and they looked at you the way a man looks at a clock when he knows what time it is but checks anyway.

His name was Ambrose Bierce.

I knew the name. Every journalist in America knew the name. Bierce had been the most feared columnist on the West Coast for thirty years — a man who could end a career with a paragraph and a reputation with a sentence. He had written "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which remains, in my opinion, the most devastating final page in American literature.

I asked him what brought him to El Paso.

"I'm going to Mexico," he said.

I asked why.

"Because I've seen all the American wars I care to see, and I hear the Mexicans are having one that's still worth watching."

I asked if that was wise, given his age.

He looked at me with those pale eyes. "I am seventy-one years old," he said. "Both of my sons are dead. My wife is dead. I have written everything I intended to write and a great deal I did not intend to write. I have no responsibilities that would suffer from my absence and no audience that would notice it. If I die in Mexico, it will be considerably more interesting than dying in Washington."

I did not know what to say to this. I bought him another whiskey.

He drank it. He told me about the Civil War — he had fought at Shiloh and Kennesaw Mountain, and had been shot in the head, a fact he related with no more emotion than if he'd been describing a change in the weather. He mentioned Hearst once: "A man who believed money was a substitute for character, and he was almost right." He told me about his children. He did not linger on this.

I asked if he was frightened.

"Of Mexico?"

"Of dying."

He finished his whiskey. "I wrote a letter to my niece," he said. "I told her that if she hears of me being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, she should know that I think that's a pretty good way to go. It beats old age. It beats disease. It beats falling down the cellar stairs." He paused. "To be a gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia."

He smiled when he said this. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a man who has written his own epitaph and is satisfied with the prose.

I asked if I could quote him.

"You can quote anything I've said tonight," he said. "None of it will matter by morning."

He stood. I stood. He shook my hand once — a dry, brief grip — and walked out of the cantina without looking back, which I would later recognise as a habit.

The next morning I went to the bridge at El Paso and watched him cross into Juárez. He was on horseback. He wore a black coat and carried a single bag. He did not look back. The horse moved at an unhurried pace, and I watched until the dust and the distance made it impossible to tell where the rider ended and the landscape began.

His last confirmed letter was dated December 26, 1913, written from Chihuahua. The final line read: "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination."

No one saw him after that. No body was found. No grave was confirmed. A priest placed a marker in a cemetery in Sierra Mojada decades later, based on local accounts, but the remains beneath it — if there are remains — have never been identified. He is, as far as the historical record is concerned, still riding south.

I have the quotes from that night. Every one of them is printable. They are among the best I have ever been given. And I have never published them, because the man who spoke them rode into a country that was burning and did not ride out, and something about printing his last words as copy felt like a violation I could not name but could not commit.

He gave me the quote. I kept it. I think he would understand.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.