by Bruce Olds
Having scared up temporary digs in town at Peyton’s Place, a dollar a night bed-and-board for myself and horse, I was awakened that first morning back by, of all things, the sound of a banjo. Couple, three rooms down. Someone going at it, strumming furioso while singing in a voice employing the vocal technique known as melisma along with a good lot of howling, growling and a stomp-holler, bucket-top scream or two.
Slipping out of bed coiled in a blanket, grabbing up my mouth harp, I dragfooted my way down the hall in bleary-eyed search of the music-maker. Which, auspiciously, is how I was to make the serendipitous acquaintance of the man who was to become my fast confederate and closest confidante in Texas, Robert McAlpin Williamson, the selfsame responsible for having secured my freedom in Anahuac. Though no one, I soon learned, called him Robert McAlpin. Or Robert, or Robbie, or Bob, or Bobby. Or, for that matter, Mick or Mac or Alp.
Willie. Everyone called him Willie. Behind his back, some called him Three-legged Willie, de Tres Patas, though never Pegleg, to his face or otherwise. He did not have three legs, of course, but his right one, right leg, was bent back, locked permanently in place behind him at a right angle, frozen at the knee, stuck that way forever owing to a consumptive condition he called, “the white-swelling,” a galloping infection of the bone and joint that, “bit up and rusted them out,” when he was 15. Odd-looking for a fact, that wayward withered limb.
“I was laid up, bed-ridden all of two years,” he confided once we got to know one another better, onto friendlier…. footing. “During which, nothing else to do, I read. The Law. On account, passed the bar at 18. My folks shot the moon trying to fix it, hinge it back aright. Nothing worked. Oil of hemlock, camphor, croton oil, tincture of iodine, syrup of chimaphila, poultices of arnica and lobelia. Nada. Paralyzed. Stove up. Good as dead.
“Got so eventually I couldn’t stand it. Fetched myself out of bed whooting like a damn ape for the pain and set to juryrigging this here contraption I’d been cogitating on while I was a-laying there. A sort of pegleg. Buckle-up, strap-on number close-fitted at the knee covered with this here detachable half-a-pantleg.” He winked then. “So whaddya think?”
“Two heads better than one,” I said, “three legs better than two? Why the hell not?”
“Jape it gives me a leg up, foot in the door. Never known it to fail. With the lassies I mean. They’re curious, get to wondering what it would be like with, so on. Truth is, I’m living with the pain each hour of every day. Don’t gripe on it, no point, nothing I can’t stand, but that dead ol’ hank hurts dreadful every time a blue norther kicks up. Whoo-e!”
Which is when I reached over, lifted the curtain of his half-a-pantleg. “Mind?”
“Not a bit.”
I rapped the wood, what I took for wood, with a knuckle. “So what is that? Cork?”
“Corkwood. Lightweight. Easy on the lugging. Weathers like a champ. Won’t rot or mold, warp, attract insects or vermin, waterproof, fireproof, and, best of all, quiet as clouds and nigh as cushiony. Compared to the cedar—used cedar for the prototype—it’s right enough plush. Still kick a man’s skull in though, hit him right.”
“So you….”
“Sure, there’s sawbones try talking me into letting them cleave it off. But why? I’d miss it, miss it the way you’d miss your own dog. Nah. Think I’ll stay whole awhile longer. Besides, getting carved on that-a-way? I’ll pass on those odds, thankee kindly.”
“But doesn’t it, I mean, there must be times….”
“Heard it all my days. He won’t be able. Can’t do this, can’t do that. Well that’s a damn lie! Mind, I’m not like to win a footrace anytime soon, but everything else? Riding, shooting, picking the banjo, pattin’ the juba and slapjazzin’, fornicating? Not a hindrance. Of course, I’ve had more than a decade of practice at it, but a man can get used to most anything, I’ve found. Human animal’s an accommodating creature, Buck.” He winked. “Can be. Sets his soul to it.”
Dimples when he smiles. I found his barely detectable lisp endearing. His breath was sweet as sassafras.
Turned out, save for the extra leg, we were much the same person, so much so I found it, not disconcerting exactly, but disarming, and I seldom am disarmed. From the moment we met, we found ourselves sharing everything—rubbish or wisdom, hard truth or lie, riddle or unpardonable slander, high farce and low comedy. We fought about nothing, disagreed about less, least of all, the more astonishing still, women.
Each, it quickly became apparent without the need to speak of it, would have given his life freely, unquestioningly, even gladly for the other.
His home place, Milledgeville, in Georgia, was no more than 70, 80 miles down the road from my own in South Carolina, we each had passed our respective state’s bar at that same unheard of early age, and while he had set foot in Texas four years before me, becoming in the meanwhile San Felipe’s first syndico procurador, its first prosecuting attorney, he had fled there for much the same sad reason, a duel fought over the dubious affections of a damn fickle woman (though unlike myself, he was fortunate enough to have only wounded his adversary in the thigh). Moreover, he likewise had labored as a newspaper editor (of the Texas Gazette and the Mexican Citizen, failing, as had I, no surprise, to eke out a decent living therefrom.)
The difference in our temperaments—Willie’s was tons lighter, breezier, more footloose than my own (this was someone, after all, whose beehive beaver hat boasted dangling from its backbrim nine polecat tails)—did not prevent us sharing similar proclivities. We both gambled for higher stakes than we had ought, appreciated the fine pure blood of a fine high horse, were unabashedly partial to damson preserves, scuppernong jam, shoofly pie and apple pan dowdy. And, needless to say, enjoyed the company, at least as we could afford it, of the fairer sex.
Whoring with Willie often culminated in what he called a “whangdoodle,” or “whambanger,” more commonly known as a menage a trois. I had never before in my life, never so much as contemplated it, although I soon discovered that on such occasions, tequila helped. Sometimes. Not that I ever have been above a little debauchery as the impulse might arise, but unlike my good friend, I do not live for such moments, nor do I fancy walking around purse poor on account. Willie though, Willie was insatiable. Dr. Johnson once remarked that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; certainly that was the case with Willie, twice over.
And, of course, we both were “Austin men.” Our politics, insofar as we were possessed of such, were an expression of our loyalty to that man, to Don Esteban, to whom we both owed so much, as in those days did every manjack in those parts.
Uncommonly companionable, Willie and myself, enough that when we decided at my suggestion to double up at Peyton’s, to share a double room, “batch it,” it set certain tongues to wagging, or so I was told later. Willie was aces as a room-mate. Let a man sleep in, brought him breakfast in bed, didn’t snore or hog the covers or travel violently beneath them. Bathed regularly and with tension-easing aromatic (spikenard) bath salts. Trimmed a man’s hair and side whiskers. Other kindly perfunctions boon and bosom.
I helped him with his seizures. Extracted the swallowed tongue.
In time, in light of all that was to transpire, it got so I was convinced that Robert McAlpin Williamson, despite wearing his epiphytes like epaulets and bromeliads like buttons, could only have been placed squarely upon god’s earth to save the bacon of William Barret Travis. The first time, of course, at Anahuac, but also, later, when those Federales come a-hunting me that summer looking to collect their thousand dollar bounty, it was Willie, no other, who stashed me out of harm’s way up north with friends ’midst the high and uncut.
And finally, during those last doomed desperate days, last hours, it was him, it was Willie alone who gave enough of a good goddamn to make the only good faith effort to effect my timely rescue.
In the seminal absence of terror we bend as if born to the bias, bloom pitched to the light towards those most like us, in the direction of our best
blending. So God bless Robert McAlpin Williamson, God bless Three-legged Willie who did his dead level best to save his own fast friend. And though in the end he failed, as any man not a god was bound to fail, God bless him, even so.
Mother
I have been told that my mother’s first words upon my birth—she fashioned herself something of a “foreteller,” my ma—her first words as she held me bunting-bundled in her arms—as her first of eleven I apparently did not come easy; near killed her, strong as she was—her first words were, “Born godless, this one, to an early grave.” Which, think about it, sounds more like a curse than not, no?
“See them furrows there? His forehead all bunched up waffle like? That there’s a sign of a powerful curiousness and confusion. Wonderin’ why he’s here, iff ’n he ought be, reckonin’ on it and not likin’ much what he’s comin’ round to. We all got us our cross to bear, but this chile here, he’s like to clumb on up there all on his own. For the view, likely. Or the nails.”
If life has taught me anything worth the being taught, it is that a man does well to listen to his mother. I did. Always did. I listened. But by the time I heard, it was too late.
Of my father, I have scant memory. It was my mother who reared me up.
Opened my eyes, there she was. Heard something, it was the sound of her voice. What I should pay attention to, what I should know, what I should love, it was my mother who vetted me along. Barely literate herself, she was the one who put some fine books in my way, who encouraged me to find inside myself whatever might be there to be found, to spend more time alone, on my own, to listen more clearly to what my heart had to tell me, what my thoughts whispered me, how to be myself within myself, all of myself without fear or fail or falter.
“You reckon who you are,” her wisest words to me, “who yer bounden to be, then you be that, all of it. You be more.”
Throughout my childhood, part of it anyway, shank of it, I had difficulty sleeping. Falling asleep did not come easily to me. Apparently sleeping was not in my nature. Hit the hay and there I lay, antsy, forfeit to a forever-long night. At some point, apparently, I slept. Apparently the effort entailed in trying to obtain sleep became so fatiguing that I succumbed. I never could recall the moment. I slept without knowing that I slept.
Not that I tossed and turned or drifted off only to start awake. My sleep, once asleep, was not troubled. But my mind. My mind was too…charged. What is the expression? Rarin’ to go. It was, apparently, incapable of respite or arrest, caesura or quietus. It remained…on. Not on fire, as it were, but fueled. It kept thinking without my permission, as if it had a mind of its own, one that I had little to do with, over which I had scant say.
I do not recall my thoughts racing, running away with themselves hurtling headlong. I recall them swarming recursively in place, each pursuing the next round and roundabout to no enumerated end. These thoughts as hornets within the hollow of their hive, busy with their brazzing, the content of which I no longer can conjure. Just thoughts, the motion and velocity of thoughts. Their onslaught.
If only there had been something, some one thing that I could not have thought, that it would not have occurred to my thinking to think about. There wasn’t.
Often, thinking to flee them, needing to, thinking I needed to flee them, I would ladder down from the loft in the dark, spider-nimble, steal barefooted across the dirt floor, unlatch, crack open and slip sidewise out the door and into the night. And then…run. In circles. Clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise again. In silence. Silent revolutions round and round across knap of ranunculus, cowslip and rye, feet herbal and yellow-stained.
We had on our palustral property a lilypadded, viridescent millpond, and I would run rutilantly around it through marshmud and mossgrass and clumpsedge, stupidly oblivious to copperhead and cottonmouth while preternaturally attuned to the bovine sounds of the beasts billeted in our barn, the burble of our brook in its bed, the bullfrogs and barn owls talking each to the other across the heady fragrance of bougainvillea and jasmine, azalea and honeysuckle.
Moon, no moon, stars, no stars (although when there were stars, I recall conceiving of each as a bejeweled and sparkling thought), rain, no rain (although when there was rain, each drop, likewise), hot or cold, I ran. It wasn’t sprinting, just a nice, steady pace to find and fall into a rhythm—and the rhyme within it, the rhyme inside that rhythm as well—that helped run the thinking out, run the thoughts away, thought to unthought to non-thought. Running thought to ground, into the ground, burial ground. Running its cerement ragged.
Slumber? What was that? Where was it in me? Each night, mystified, I wondered: am I the only one in the world, the only soul alive so afflicted, so lost to thought in the night, held hostage by the exhilirating darkness of thinking?
Lost child adrift. Young soul unsung. Sleep now. Hush, child. Sleep.
He began keeping his diary in earnest that September of 1833 as, quoting a prefatory passage therefrom, “a form of architecture, an ARK, I won’t say casket, but a ‘built-nest’ patched of words intended to preserve certain of my memories, lest they be lost, with as much unadorned facticity as my pen can muster.”
Following his death, the document fell into the hands of the Mexican Army until—the “chain-of-custody” in the interim remains a matter much contested—those portions of it remaining intact found their way back to Texas and the archives of that state’s university in Austin where access to its available contents was severely restricted on a closely monitored, “need to know” basis as determined by university officials.
A few of its earliest entries:
Chingaba una mujer que es cincuenta y seis en mi vida. (Sept. 26, 1833)
[Translation: “I fucked a woman, the 56th of my life.”]
Chingaba la Suana que es 59. (Nov. 7, 1833)
Chingaba la Juanita que es 60. (Dec. 2, 1833)
Chingaba la C que es 61. (Dec. 19, 1833)
Chingaba la Mariana que es 69. (Jan. 22, 1834.)
Prospering, thriving, flourishing, save for this fucking venerea mala. Six months on the mercury cure; no change. But the practice booms. Clients abound. Have hired a bookkeeper, taken on an apprentice. Own six horses. As many chattel. Raising bees, farming fish, planting orchards and gardens. I may have met a woman. (Feb. 2. 1834)
Becca
I only knew him those two years before he went off and got himself killed. Murdered. Massacred. Martyred. Which, by the way, was just his way.
Us Cummings was one of the First Families. “The Old Three Hundred.” Original settlers, founding settlers, the ones Mister Austin brung in to seed his colony. Made us feel like some brand of Mayflower royalty. First Pilgrims.
My best recollection, we arrived in ’21 or ’22; come on down from Kintuck. “We” being my bachelor brother John, my widowed Ma Rebekah Russell, my brothers, James and William, and my sister, Sarah. Settled in at Mill Creek on the Brazos. Arroyo Palmetto, Mex called it. I would have been 10 then, 11 maybe.
We had five leagues. 22,000 acres. 33 square miles. Cummings Hacienda, everyone called it. All of an empire, we thought. All the lumber that went into building up San Felipe, all that wood come from our sawmill. John said, we Cummings’ built that town.
We had cattle. Thousand head maybe. Slaves. Three dozen maybe. And when you figure they was going $300 to $600 to $900 a head, a chattel I mean, reckon we was rich. Walkin’ in tall cotton.
I do now remember that date. It was fate. Can’t forget it. Don’t want to. September 2, 1833. That night, it was stormin’ out. Thunder, lightning, wind gone all slaunchways. Real cattywampus hummer. Whomperjawed sidewangler, you know. What they used to call a gullywasher. So it’s right in the middle of this here frog-strangler that the door to our inn—we’d opened it up only that February out off the east bank of the creek half-a-dozen miles north of San Felipe—the door swings open and sloshing on through wide shouldered comes this figure at once bone-soaked and looking more lost than Adam.
But I could tel
l straight off he was a gentleman. Trigged out that way with them knee-high shining shop-mades and wide-awning white hat and blue shawl-cape. Toffed up, you know. Rag proper. Kind of man pays as much mind to his wardrobe as his women and not on account of his women neither. Straightaway I thought him a cavalier. Cavalier and swashbuckler. Straight off.
Something in his carriage. Forward, but without the swagger, like he owned it, ground he walked on. Whaddya call—self-assured, self-possessed, serious-minded. So it was sort of comical, man like that, so sober-sided, it was an amusement, a man like that looking so sorry and wore out and wrung wet, rain slicking off him in gantlets, just a-flowing off his hat brim, flouncing off in flumes.
Tells us he’s got all turned around out there and needs to put up ’til morning. He looked turned around all right, turned around and wet. Angry too. All bowed up, you know. Or not angry, but peeved, put out—with himself, you know—on account of the embarrassment of it. Looking foolish enough to ’a gone and got all caught out that way.
So right there was the first time we landed eyes on each other. Didn’t exchange a word. Just laid on looks. Not leers, not oglings, but each glance, each glimpse a character. I do remember that.
Must have been a week or two later he started coming around, catting around, dropping in fair regular-like, two, three times a month. Until with time we got to palavering some, then some more, then confabulating a lot more, and before I know it, he’s escorting me to old Ira Lewis’s Christmas fandango. Belle of the ball he calls me, and so I am, dancing the night away. Best rugcutter in Texas bar none, clean swan-footed, Will was. Owned two pair of dancing pumps, one black, one red. Two!
And then, after a stretch of sparking, March, early, he asked me please for a lock of my hair, which I don’t see the harm, and gave me my first presents—package of cinnamon and this here ivory breast brooch carved up in the figure of a ruby-eyed catamount which he knew by then I was partial to. Prized it then. Prize it still. And in exchange took off my ring, a “cat’s eye,” and gave him that, which he tried on right there, onto his pinkie finger which it wouldn’t, being too big around, so took to wearing it on a knotted whang looped round his neck; periapt.
