This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  I did not want my flesh and blood reared by a man who was not his flesh and blood. I did not want my son calling another man, a different man, a man other than myself, father. Nor did I want his mother to have him. I wanted to deprive her of having him.

  Because, frankly, I was frightened. Lately, I was having dreams of the death of my son. I dreamt nightly of the death of my son. Run over by a wagon, bucked off a horse, trampled by beeves, bitten by a rabid dog, struck by lightning, burned up in a fire, drowned in a river, pitched out of a tree, fallen down a snakepit, swarmed by yellowjackets, lost in a swamp, eaten by wild beasts, felled by pox and fever. The death scenarios were infinite.

  I wanted, now, to keep him near me. I needed to. To keep him safe. My own peace of mind.

  She could have her daughter. I wanted my son.

  I was not sentimental about it, but I cared about caring for him. Felt responsible. And, yes, did not want him to grow up without me. Knowing me. At least a little. And that I loved him. In my way.

  Insofar as possible, I intended to make up for lost time, the absent years.

  I knew we are strangers. I knew that well enough.

  With a minimum of fuss, surprisingly, little but some meager nominal resistance from his mother, Chazzie joined me that spring. (Why did she not fight me on this? Had she ceased to hate me? I hoped not. She should hate me. It did her no credit not to hate me. Perhaps she did not love her son.)

  Six years old. Or soon to be.

  Honestly, though, what did I know of six-year-old boys? Or about fathering one, parenting one? The memory of my own was hardly helpful; no model there. Whether my natural instincts, paternal instincts, parental instincts are the correct ones, or even if I am possessed of them, I could only wonder. I knew only what I recalled from having once been one myself, a six-year-old boy.

  I recalled little enough.

  Depositing Chaz out of harm’s way with my friend David Ayres at his Methodist boarding school up in Montville, I visited him there as I was able, if not as often as I might have preferred. When I did visit, however, I made certain not to arrive empty-handed. I brought him presents. Molasses candy on a cord, a bag of marbles, a pocketknife, an ivory balero, an ocarina. Did I expect that such tokens would endear me to him? Was I endeavoring to win his love by buying him off with cheap bribes? Trying to bridge a lifetime’s distance with trinkets?

  When he told me that he had his heart set on his own pony, I promised him, perhaps later. Then a dog, he said. More possible, I replied. I told him then that when I was his age, I had a pet owl named Oswald. Mister Oz. Ozzie. What I did not tell him was that our family also had dogs, kept dogs, several dozen dogs that his grandpa had bred and rebred and crossbred and inbred, dreaming of producing what he called “the perfect fighting speciman,” and which, in the end, predictably enough, produced quite the opposite—a maniacal race of distempered, half-blind, pariah mutants, most of which either died off young of their own grotesque and wayward defects, or had to be put down in the wake of having been gang-mauled by their half-crazed, blood-hungry packmates.

  Tousling his slapdash shock of chestnut hair, I instructed him please to stop calling me “Sir,” that “Father” would do quite nicely. We arm and thumb wrestled; he won two out of three. We footraced; he beat me by a country mile. Had breath-holding contests; he outlasted me twice over. I taught him how to whistle, shuffle a deck of cards, tie a slipknot, negotiate a handstand, swim the backstroke, play mumblety-peg, count sheep to sleep, how to write his name backwards then hold it to a mirror, cup a hummingbird in his hand. Using blunt-tipped wooden staves, I taught him how to parry and thrust.

  I asked him questions about himself, what he liked, what he didn’t, if he had any special magical powers, secret abilities or hidden identities, lucky charms or tutelary spirits.

  What I did not ask him, made a point of not asking him, was, “Do you miss your mother?”

  A single extant image of Travis “from life” is a pen-and-ink sketch idly doodled by San Felipe friend and fellow duelist, Wyly Martin, dated December 1835. This being a chest-up “fair likeness” showing a broad-shouldered man in his youthful prime with noticeably receding hairline and jaw-long sidewhiskers framing a face possessed of regular, pleasant enough features, bearing a distant, even dreamy, not entirely distracted gaze above a thin-lipped, bemused half-smile.

  The impression is that of a minister’s philosophical only son. Philosophical or poetical. Anything but a firebrand spirit embodying the hopes, dreams and aspirations of any damn one, much less all of a frontier.

  Or, needless to say, but let us say it anyway, an inspirational leader of men.

  Its authenticity remains a matter of dispute, as does its accuracy.

  Voices

  “He was uncommonly brainful while being noted for neither an abundance of wit nor humor, both of which traits rendered him rather less beloved than he might otherwise have been. For the most part, in the brief time we knew one another, I cannot say that we got on. Still I could not help feeling a certain amount of pity for a man who so hungered to be admired, but, however much he might in certain respects have richly deserved it, had no idea whatever how to go about winning it.” (J. Hampton “Hamp” Kuykendall, Apprentice at Law to W.B. Travis, Esq.)

  “Travis tuvo el duende de diez hombres y el corazón valiente de un león, pero su temperamento poético con demasiada frecuencia nublo su mejor juicio.” (Travis had the duende of ten men and the brave heart of a lion, but his poetical temperament too often clouded his best judgment.) “I believe he wanted better for us. Mi gente. My people. He had el corazón. The heart. He had el cerebro. The brain. He had los cojones. The balls. He had ganas. The will and desire. When I heard the news of his death, I wept, I drank, I danced.” (Juan N. Seguin)

  “Brilliant, brave, brash, brusque—in that order. A young man of inestimable even transcendant talents. Had he lived he eventually would have been elected President of Texas, of that there can be little doubt, anymore than that he would have flatly refused the office. He was just that smart. No self-aggrandizing Houston. No swaggering Bowie. He was stalwart. I loved him like a son.” (Stephen Fuller Austin)

  “Not a man I put much stock in, frankly. Stirred up more trouble than he was worth. Not just an intemperate hothead, but one with a high-and-mighty opinion of himself. Impossible to control, and he desperately required controlling since he was so incapable of controlling himself. Consider the way he died. Wholly unnecessary. A grand waste. All those deaths were.” (Sam Houston)

  “He treated me mean and shabby. Did me dirt. I don’t forgive’m, but I’m right sorry he died. Way he died. Fondle better’n the fuck sort. You know the kind. Talked a better poke ’n’ he ever put out. Never did know true bleakness ’til I knowed him.” (Rosanna Cato)

  “Most-wise, he massa me kindly. No lash or hand laid on. Clad me fine. Kept warm of winters. But ain’t yer say. Goes where’s yer tol. Even hell. Died a man on them walls. There beside him. Seen it all. Died a man. Gone on home now to Jesus.” (Joe, Travis’s man-servant)

  “That young man was a credit to his race and a boon ornament to his time. White race. Troubled time. I am proud to claim him as a native son of our fair state. His like walks among us too seldom. I might wish we had a hundred more of his kind here. Hell, I wish we had a thousand!” (C.C. Clay, Governor of Alabama)

  Houston

  Sam Houston, frankly, I did not much care for—and here, at the risk of sounding the backbiter, I should pause briefly to explain why I did not much care for Sam Houston.

  I did not much care for Sam Houston, not owing to his being a hopeless sot—the Mexicans not incorrectly call him El Gran Borracho, the Big Drunk—or because he was an equally hopeless, self-congratulatory, devious boor and liar who lied even when it was unnecessary to do so, but because he had convinced himself that he and our cause, Don Esteban’s cause, the cause of Texas, were one and the same, and that what was good for Sam Houston was good for Texas, and that if cert
ain hard sacrifices, mortal sacrifices on the part of others were required to ensure that Sam Houston succeeded in realizing his private ambitions, which in fact were little more than Andrew Jackson’s private ambitions—namely, to annex Texas to the United States and anoint Sam Houston its first headman—then those sacrifices, human sacrifices, were acceptable ones.

  If the world needed to die that Sam Houston might live, live and ascend—soar—then the world needed to die, no apologies extended. Everything, everyone else was expendable.

  Sam Houston was a devourer of the flesh of others that he might give his own life a run for its money. Money and fame and power.

  I might wish that this was hyperbole. It is not hyperbole.

  Houston, who had on more than one occasion dismissed Austin as “a viper without fangs”—though if Austin was a viper, then might I suggest that Houston was a vulture, six feet two inches of vulture—Houston was a man who was all for Houston. While Austin, to draw the required distinction, was a man who was all for Texas.

  Now, whether Austin loved Texas as much as Houston loved Houston, I should hesitate to venture, but certainly the latter was not the man who over the past 15 years—15!—had in the name of defending the lives and livelihoods of his friends and neighbors suffered personal insult, physical breakage, material impoverishment and 14 months confined to a Mexican dungeon. Indeed, at the behest of Jackson, Houston had been in Texas scarcely three.

  This, in part, was why I did not much care for Sam Houston, a feeling, so my impression, that was nothing if not mutual. Despite his favorite son status with Washington D.C. as Andrew Jackson’s intimate and political protege, despite his access to those corridors of power, despite in a word, his clout, I did not trust him.

  Having politicked his way to being appointed Major-General and Commander-in-Chief of the so-called Federal Regular Army of Texas—the man was a genius politicker, no eyeblink was uncalculated—it was on Christmas Day 1835 that Houston commissioned me his Lieutenant Colonel Commanding of Cavalry, tasking me to raise a troop of 400 men-of-horse, after which I was to proceed the 150 miles west to San Antonio de Bejar, the largest town in Texas (pop. 2,507), to join with the men garrisoning an old Spanish mission there called, so I was told, the Alamo, then under the command of our Colonel of Artillery, Clint Neill.

  In doing so, Houston made it plain to me that he in fact had little use for cavalry, that our horsemen could not hope to equal the Mexican’s own, that he was strictly an infantry and artillery man. What he made no less plain was that he was convinced that Bejar was of little or no real strategic consequence, being a too-isolated outpost that, should it come to it, would be better abandoned and demolished than defended. Ergo, his hollow gesture of a gratuitous commission and superfluous deployment.

  He wished me exiled. Or worse.

  While it may indeed be the case that humanity adores only those who cause it to perish, adoring of Sam Houston I decidedly was not.

  And so, set up to fail, I failed. As Houston knew full well that I must. My recruitment efforts met with abject, humiliating failure. Having succeeded in enlisting precisely 26 men, what choice did I have? I tendered my resignation. Which, Houston, naturally, immediately refused, ordering me instead to proceed with my 26-man “legion,” as he sarcastically referred to it, to Bejar.

  Naturally, I did not want to go. I decided not to go. No, I told myself, I will not go, but first, I will consult Don Esteban, whose affection for Houston all but rivals my own.

  When I told Austin that I had decided not to go, that I would not go, he told me, I must say much to my dismay, that I must go, that I had “no conceivable choice” but to go. He appealed to my vanity. And ambition.

  “Texas needs you now, Buck,” he said in a voice hair-lined with cracks. “This has nothing to do with Houston. The man be a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel, and if, as General of our army, it is his considered determination that you are needed in Bejar, then as both the patriot I know you to be, as well as the soldier I know you are capable of being, it is your duty to go there.”

  “With respect,” I replied, “I shall go on, sir, as it pleases you to counsel. I shall do my duty, forlorn as it is, but the patriotism of a few, while it may do much, cannot do enough. It cannot perform miracles, much less that which is required. And we both know what is required.

  “Money. We must raise money, or Texas is lost. In this, I have strained every nerve, exhausted my personal credit twice over, have slept neither day nor night, and yet, despite all this… exertion, the people remain cold and indifferent.

  “Where, sir, the fervor? Where, pray tell, the numbers? Numbers in sufficient number. Twenty-six, might I be permitted to remind you. The number sickens me. I have succeeded in enlisting but 26! Patriotism is easy, too easy while the sun yet brightly shines.”

  Now, by the time he returned to Texas after being released from his imprisonment in Mexico City in late ’35, Stephen Fuller Austin, while a much-reduced and broken man both in heart and health, also was a much radicalized one, something I apprehended when shortly after his return to San Felipe he had confided to me that, “A year spent detained, Buck, un rehen, a hostage, rotting in a Mexican prison at the pleasure of the self-appointed powers that be, deprived of all access to legal representation, denied due process, that sort of experience you may believe can materially alter one’s outlook.

  “I truly did believe in her once you know, mi Madre México. But now? Now must come the final break. Now must war to the hilt and the hub. We must only Americanize Texas, Buck. Every other avenue, every conceivable remedy has been utterly exhausted. I will wear myself out by inches before I will submit to Santa Anna.”

  Poor Don Esteban. He had yet to regain his pallor. His flesh was crepe, his hair tinseled with snow. His teeth, those remaining, were yellowed and browned. His hands visibly trembled. He walked with a stoop; his gait was unsteady. He no longer could mount a horse without assistance.

  So much breakage suffered. So much damage done. So much sacrifice made. Too much. He had given too much. Given all. He appeared petrified, some fossilized relic of archaeology. Forty-two years old. He looked 60.

  “Go on and do your duty, Buck,” he admonished. “Despite all, the paltry number, which I agree is most inauspicious, do your duty, and in the end you will not only have performed a critical public service for our cause in its hour of greatest moment, it will, trust me, redound to your private benefit to have done so. It will, son, save your soul.”

  I ate crow then, ate several servings of humble pie, swallowed hard, wished Don Esteban godspeed, saddled up, fetched along my slave-boy Joe—where I was bound, I might well, I anticipated, have dire need of a slave-boy—and headed out.

  I headed for the Alamo.

  “Giddap!”

  On my way out of San Felipe, I stopped to file a certain legal document with Three-legged Willie. This gesture of prudence. I had a hunch:

  I, William Barret Travis, of the town of San Felipe in Austin Colony, State of Texas, & by the law of colonization an adopted citizen of same, who by permission of divine providence now enjoy good health with a sound & disposing mind, believing in the doctrines of Christianity & taking into consideration THE UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE, knowing it is appointed FOR ALL MEN TO DIE & in order that the mind shall at that time BE RELEASED from the care of all temporal concerns, have thought proper to make & publish this act as my Last Will & Testament:

  Everything, all of it, only, to my child,

  Charles Edward Travis,

  and nothing, nothing at all, to everyone else.

  “Giddap!”

  On January 25th, 1836, Generalissimo Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebron addressed the 6,019 assembled troops of his Expeditionary Army of the Republic of Mexico gathered for grand review at Saltillo, the capital city of the state of Coahuila, some 325 miles southwest of San Antonio de Bejar.

  Comrades in arms:

  Our most sacred duties have brought
us to these uninhabited lands and demand our engaging in combat against a rabble of wretched adventurers to whom our authorities have unwisely given benefits that even our Mexican citizens do not enjoy, and who have taken possession of this vast and fertile area, convinced that our own unfortunate internal divisions have rendered us incapable of defending our own soil.

  Wretches! Soon they will become aware of their own folly.

  Soldiers:

  We will march as long as the interests of the nation that we serve demand. The claimants to the acres of Texas land will soon know to their sorrow that their reinforcements from New Orleans, Mobile, Boston, New York, and other points north, whence they should never have come, are insignificant, and that Mexicans, generous by nature, will not leave unpunished affronts resulting in injury or discredit to their country, regardless of who the aggressors may be.

  My friends:

  Lest you forget, they are nothing but, una chusma de adventureros desgaciados, bandidos, y asesinos a la que nuestro país tiene desde hace demasiado tiempo imprudentemente concedido el estatuto y los beneficiosa favor inmerecido. A rabble of wretched adventurers, bandits, and murderers to whom our country has for far too long unwisely granted favored status and unmerited benefits. They are pirates, and as such, must be expelled to their last extremity regardless of whether they have families or not, and all their dwellings need to disappear to the last jacale lest they entertain the hope of ever returning to them for shelter.

  My loyal brothers:

  Be assured that should evidence be discovered that the government of the North American states is materially supporting the rebellion in Texas, I will continue the march of this army to Washington City and raise upon its Capitol the Mexican flag.