This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  And then out of the blue, just like that, he was down on a knee asking for my hand.

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a featherduster. We’d known each other how long? Five, six months? Didn’t feel enough yet. Whirlwind. And then, too, I knew his reputation. Everyone did. His taste for it, you’ll pardon the expression. I mean, I knew by then who he was. What’s that word? Voluptuary? Which I don’t think he was, not all of him, not like Three-legged Willie. A part, maybe. Some part. Small part.

  We all knew about Anahuac. Knew too he was an almighty favorite of Mister Austin, enough so he’d just got himself elected secretary of the colony. Knew his law practice over in San Felipe was up and panning out to beat the band. Knew he was propertied, so on. But it was then he let out with the news—he warn’t a widower, way he’d let on, but a lawful, spoken-for, married man. And with a child! But that he was divorcing. Had the papers all drawed up, which he showed me.

  So that, you can imagine, come as a right shock. Put a fair knot in things, cuz right then, heat of the moment, I was much of a mind to break it off, wait on the legalities. I won’t trim. Indeed I did pitch a fit or two, pitched all of a hiss. But by then we was too much each for the other, all of a mash, just both way too plumb sweet. I’d set my cap, lit my candle, and that was that. So the next month, early April, we was engaged, pledged for all time, beatin’ hearts betrothed.

  When I cipher it up, calculate on it, we had a year-and-a-half of spooning. Such nice times, nice as I ever had. Naughty times too. Being young together, young and loving, in love, doing what young lovers do, a fair lot of ravishing. Reckoned we’d have more, of course, why wouldn’t I? All the more in the world, our world, the one we’d build each for the other.

  Will was something. A charmer. Chancer. That private privateer’s grin of his. And a right good lover. Gentleman lover. Gentle lover with me, always. Why be shy about it?

  Too late now to be shy. We was all about a future then, ours, the one folding open like a fan. Everything ahead. Everything possible. Everything promised. All the things a future means, and all it brings.

  We listened close, listened patiently to our dreams.

  It will surprise some to hear we didn’t talk much politics, surprise on account of how he spoke out in public, wrote in the newspapers, walked around armed, so on. But with a thousand dollar bounty on your head, wouldn’t you? Those were violent times, or getting to be. It was a violent place, or becoming one. You rode out unarmed at your peril. But then you rode out armed at your peril just the same. He rode out more than most.

  Even then I heard some who called him our “Voice.” He was just beginning to be called that, Voice of the Revolution. What the Mex called him, of course, was something different. Called him, “The ungrateful, bad citizen, W.B. Travis, who would incite cut-throat revolution against us.” All of which would force him into hiding that last summer, whole month of August, ’35. Mex never found him, of course. It was Three-legged Willie, found out later, who stashed him, cuz at the time I had no idea, didn’t know, he wouldn’t say or confide. “For your own good,” he said. “Whatever I do, Bec, wherever I wind up, trust me, it’s for you and Don Esteban and Texas.”

  You couldn’t ask him to change his ways that way. He was just that man. Standing by, laying off, looking away, keeping still, holding his tongue, letting a thing go, letting it pass, “capitulating to the inevitable,” he called it, that wasn’t him. Wasn’t in him not to do. To resist. Some thought it dirty work. He didn’t. He called it “my privilege.”

  “My object, Bec,” he told me, “is to behave as a man apart and re-born and exiled, one entitled to—no, meriting—one meriting this country enough to wish to be buried beneath her whenever my time may come, and, afterwards, permit the land to trample my body to mingle as one. I shall never leave this country or look back upon her with nostalgia. I intend to lend more than just a simple hand. It isn’t about saving one’s own skin. It is about staking one’s claim. Staking one’s all. All in, to the quick.”

  And then that October. Second week as I recollect it. Word come that Mr. Austin was calling for volunteers to run the Mex army out of Bejar! That it was occupying Bejar. Bejar, for pity’s sake! 150 miles further out west who the hell knows where? So, of course, no questions asked, no odds calculated, not a thought for himself, anything Don Esteban wants. Will was blind willful loyal to that man, I mean to say above all things on this here good green godly earth.

  Last time I saw him—in the flesh I mean, cuz I still keep my memories, still have my dreams—I recollect it being January, that week or two after he won his Colonel’s rank. He was up on his big-rumped sorrel mare, Flaca, leaning down for our parting kiss. “We will be married when I return,” he said and smiled. Struck me, a sad smile, sad in its bluff, its bravery, and off he rode, not a hand-wave good-bye.

  And here’s the iron in it for you. When he left that day, he was divorced. We didn’t know it then, but it had come through at last. We could’ve been married.

  Ain’t that just like life? Ain’t life just like that?

  Looking back, maybe it’s best the way it went. I wouldn’t have minded, though. Being Mrs. William Barret Travis. I would’ve been proud, proper proud, wearing his name.

  There was a last letter.

  The letter from that Alamo didn’t reach me until he and the rest was gone, all of ’em all gone, not that I knew it at the time. I’ve lost it long since, but do rightly recollect some three things of it. One was the sweet line, “I shall never be so happy as when I am shed of this wretched place and in your arms again.” A second was a piece of flattery pertaining to the nature of my “wiles,” the language of which I shan’t repeat here. And the third was how he intended to surrender the Alamo if reinforcements did not arrive in the next day or two, along with the promise that he’d be right along home directly soon after.

  I never did go there, you know. Never did visit and never will. Couldn’t. Can’t. Not that place. Its burning ground. Too afraid. Too scared. To hear those dead a-cryin’. Them rough gods a-ridin’. Will’s own lamentations. Or worse, his silence.

  Don’t know what else to say about him. He was this, he was that, some other. I know there were those thought less than kindly of him. Politicians, mainly. That Houston lot. Same ones’ll tell you now they was his best friends.

  Truth is, he could be a handful. Stand-offish, sure, I saw that, time to time. Fast to rankle, hackle up, too quick-tongued maybe. Tart. Overproud. Meek, mild and malleable, he surely was not. But then, every man, even the best, especially the best, has his shortcomings. His warn’t nothing I could not abide.

  He was attentive. He paid attention. Catered. Cared. Doted even. Made me feel alive. More alive. Even now, despite the wounding. That there’s a rare and precious quality in a person, don’t you think? And, you know, we never understand, not really, how deeply we love someone until the moment they are taken from us. We may think we know, but we don’t. Because we can’t. It is only in their absence that we begin to appreciate the force and fullness of their presence.

  The problem with death—well, there’s a passel of problems with death, ain’t there?—but one of them, one of the hard ones, the one that won’t go away, is, when it comes, it stays.

  You’d think after all this time, I’d’ve got over it. Him. Lord knows I’ve tried, that I keep trying. But you can’t clean a person out of you with a wish, and forgetting don’t come easy.

  I still miss him. I surely sorely do.

  What I’d like to know is whether we fall in love simply to distract ourselves. To divert our attention, kill time, keep our minds off the one thing, the only thing that really matters. What I’d like to know is, what is the point of beauty? Why all the fuss and foment and folderol? She who cannot be caught, is she whom forever is sought. She who eludes, is she whom is pursued. She who cannot be acquired, is she whom must be possessed.

  Intrigue——Bargain——Management——Success (Travis Diary, March 12, 1
834)

  I had, then, been living with myself long enough. Good company, but a man tires of it. Finds himself…dwindling.

  Becca was a revelation. As for instance that first time when in the dark my fingertips traced the features of her face; those everted, orchidate lips.

  And every time thereafter.

  We said so much. Left so much unsaid. Left more unsaid than said. That which we said, sufficed.

  I craved her. What else is there to say? The appentence. The ataraxy. No script or choreography, master plan, plot. No thought. Lust lifts love as it will regardless, leavens it lovelier. Sheer.

  It quickly became—how could it not?—a matter of arriving at precipices, spanning chasms, piercing walls, crossing borders, closing gaps, occupying thresholds, scaling apexes, sifting details, steadying nerves, violating boundaries, charting menustrations of the moon. A matter of falling into one another (beneath that same moon), heart into heart, soul enfolding soul while tenting, so-called, to the touch. Internal touch.

  My sense of her scent was of vanilla and anise, licorice and clove; of her taste, tumeric and tamarind, saffron and sea salt. Cucumber perhaps. Sea cucumber perhaps. Something seaworthy. (Of course, tastes differ). Naptha? No. Verbena water? Perhaps. White tea. White musk tea. Steeped.

  It was seven miles overland, my place to hers. Things typically take their course if only they are permitted to do so. If we let them. Life does. Typically, even if we don’t.

  I see her huddling hunched inside her vicuna poncho puffing periodically upon her kaolin clay pipe, reading my palm, remarking how, “Your life does matter, in the event you were wondering, which, I could not help noticing, you were. Friendly word? Look forward. Leave the looking back to me. You’re only as good as you last.”

  Mysterious, such scrying. To me at least. Witchy woman. But then, as she was wont to suggest, there are occasions when we wonder whether we can or do or ought believe what we believe, apprehend what we believe we apprehend, that impel us to question the nature of that which remains unseen, imperceptible beneath, beyond, within.

  Even now I am at a loss to explain, despite my suspicion at the time, how one thing inevitably leads co-extensively far and further away from another.

  She, for her part, was stricken, haunted by the unsettling implications of a presentiment describing an event or episode entailing watchfires extinguished along the watchtowers, dumped in a pit, stacked on a pyre, buried borne upon billowing winds before brooding unbidden upon the ruins wrought by a tyranny pledged to purge and pogrom.

  Ashes to that which is less than ashes.

  I might have listened, better. Better, had I listened.

  She knew. Claimed to know: “The least is yet to come. Dying, going to heaven, discovering you don’t much like it there as much as you thought you might, or, conceivably, at all. A blessing of sorts. Here today, gone later today. Your life is in your hands. Inscribed there, scripted, pre-written. Amor fati. You needn’t hold it near.

  “The dead will be carried ungently, their load pitched and tossed, their mass grave excavated of communal fires. Wait your turn. Sit tight. Establish a fix upon the specifics. First principles. Articles of faith. Emblazon boundaries. Prioritize. Eschew deceit. Know when never to quit. Only the tough last longest.

  “There conceivably will be any number of sole survivors. A conspiracy of one or less.

  “Life is not personal, but, of course, neither is it impersonal. Say what you will, there are moments. A matter of rhizomes. Splice and suture, suture and splice. So it seams. Of sift and sieve. Panned gold. Be patient. All that glitters is seldom clear. It blinds.

  “You share very little in common with yourself, don’t you?”

  All very well, but as I say, I was more wont to be occupied seeking her face, the face behind the face, hidden face, naked face, original face, the one before we were born, before the world was made, before it presumed. (Masks have their place, but recognition need not follow. Inscrutability, even opacity inevitably reveal more than can their counterparts. Clarity is complex. It clarifies less often than it complicates.)

  All the middles of the night that I awoke unquenched to forage, ravish, to rampage her face with mine eyes—her several smiles as she slept—savor it in a single, endless, unmediated swallow. Better moments I had never known, or would.

  She said, continuing, that, “There exists little choice in life but to live it. As its hand may be dealt. Proceed accordingly. So much is pure fiction. The cards do not care. This is nothing new. There can be nothing new between a man and a woman. No one, not a soul, ever taught anyone anything, not a single simple thing about love. There is much to be said for el estilo mexicano. I forget just what.”

  I was drawn to her flaws no less than her flavors. What others doubtless would have called flaws.

  She knew, knew that I knew, that her voice was not unpleasant, if too diapason, often inaudible, curiously soft, mallow-soft. My habit was to foot-tap to her fricatives or hum in consecution, as less often to her sweetbriar triphthongs, her plosives scarce less.

  Her feet were outsized, especially for one as lightfooted as she.

  Neither jug nor ladle-eared, beetled of brow or lanterned of lithic jaw.

  Attractive of thickset thigh, toned of well-defined bum, the slots between her toes, I recall very well, being redolent of shaved ginger and fresh mint muddled and mulled.

  A blaze of birthmark the color of iodine saddled her nose. I was now and then tempted to mount it, gallop it high and homeward.

  Her yawns, thanks be, seldom emerged as groans; her laughter seesawed delightfully, as if in solar/lunar balance.

  Intimacy. My god! What a word, last word! What a concept! The mossy precincts, the mangrove swamps, the quayside quim, the shoal-less ciliated fund and foliated fetch, I mean vetch of all that lot—creased, greased, gashed and groomed. The gush from its groove, V’d there. Bah!

  “Passions are not cling peaches, kid.” She was decidedly earnest upon the subject. “You cannot can or jar them, preserve, store, stock them shadowed on a shelf hid aslant the sun, any more than you can waltz with the rainfall or ride high the west wind. For they will find a way. Some entangling way. Bank on it.”

  We would ride out on dewlapped mornings against the high winds, into the tall grass, switch and grama, fast and hooving faster, adept with speed, aiming to outrace the other, lose ourselves amidst the antelope, the pronghorns whinging up over the river, crossing the Brazos. We might fish some, though I despise fishing. Strip down, peel off, she undoing her torsade, swim naked in dips and plunges, she eeling over me, under, over, swing of hair, sweep of water, laughter like small arms fire.

  At such times, sacred times, delirious times, deliriously sacred times, an oozing would pleat over us as a honey fresh from its combs. Of a sudden, then, nothing could have been more natural than that our minds leave in advance, confident that we would, as we never failed to do, meet up with them later, having followed lockstepped, bereft of right axis. Left disarrayed, yes. Disarranged, yes. Left winded, but lighter. Lightened.

  “Ah, so this is intimacy.” I thought then. “This. Here. Now.” Remember thinking then, will always remember thinking: “Use my flesh as parchment. Draw your dreams in skin.”

  She knew—how, I never knew, was never to know—a number of wiles (so-called). These beguilingly occultish maneuvers that, if daunting, were no less besotting. How limber she was! How lubricious! From co-mingled fluids to trans-mingled foams, The Impartress of Pleasure, full-throated if no less full-blown.

  Now, one is as accountable for one’s own fancies and foibles as in like measure one’s fallacies, no? But we are owed nothing, entitled to nothing by right of birth or sweat of brow, though it redoundeth naught to say so, hand to heart or hellbound.

  “When are you happiest?” She was interested in knowing. “What makes you happiest?”

  Wished, then, that I could have said. Wish I knew even now. “Autumn maybe. Days of the leaves. The high heatherligh
t, harvest light fallen slant across knap and thatch. Listening to the leaves change their several scents. Quince, or char. Feeling one with, within the parade of death color. The dismantling and disassemblage as orange through the gray, dissolving. The pull of that pall, its pallor decomposing to sap. Autumn is all I ever could ask.

  “There also is something in the hoot of the owl that I find deeply, disconcertedly comforting. A connection at a middling distance. But why? My thoughts often resonate with the music woven of the penny whistle. That’s some consolation, I’d like to say.

  “I don’t know. I don’t. The way night caves in? Something in the stars? To wish upon or steer by? There rather than here. And in the midst of it, the self-interrogation. In those moments when I am self-interrogating. The contunded immanence of it all, the contused immutability. It is too much. I am too much. Too fuerte. Take from me what you will. Or can. Hurry, I need you to. I’m yours.”

  “Then I will help you.”

  “Please, do. Please help me. Cathect me. Help me stand up on my own.” Or, I did not say, I shall fall apart, go to pieces, smithereen amidst this chaos, this Tejas, knowing it will never be the same. Ever again.

  O, those were the days. Those were a sheer tumble-down of trans-celestial hours as real as any fantasia or phantasmagoria you might have a hankering or the capacity to right conjure.

  Setting the world afire.

  Setting his soul afire.

  Setting fire to the dark soul of his world.

  Firing his soul through the darkness of the world.

  His energy a leap at the needle’s eye, intact, aflame, out the other side. Smoking.

  His charred Valhalla soul.