by Bruce Olds
He then issued to his generals:
Standing Orders
to the Expeditionary Army of Operations
in Tejas
(by authority of His Most Serene and Beneficent Highness, Generalissimo Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna de Pérez de Lebron, President and Supreme Leader for Life of Mexico)
Numero Uno: Every Mexican who has fought with the rebels or in any way supported them is to be hanged. No protracted trials. Hang them summarily for treason.
Numero Dos: Every American colonist who has taken arms against us is to be shot. Again, no exceptions, no trials.
Numero Tres: Those who supported the rebels but did not take up arms, are to be expelled forever from Mexican soil.
Numero Cuatro: All American immigrants, regardless of their sympathies, are to be removed at least 100 miles south of the Rio Grande, whether they can bring their household possessions or not.
Numero Cinco: Further immigration from the American states into Tejas or any other part of Mexico is strictly forbidden.
Numero Seis: The people of Tejas are to repay every peso of expense incurred on this expedition to discipline them.
Numero Siete: Any foreigner in Tejas who is arrested while in possession of arms of any kind is to be judged a pirate, treated accordingly and hanged without trial.
Numero Ocho: Most important and to be stressed above all—once the battle has begun, if the enemy has not previously surrendered, no prisoners will be taken. They are to be shot, bayoneted, or lanced upon the field of battle where they are captured.
Travis Diary, Jan. 26, 1836:
There are times when the appeal of an intelligent indifference, a sublime and well-considered disengagement is almost too alluring to resist. Those moments when one wishes only to flee the darkness, the inhumanity, duplicity and corruption, convinced that suffering the world a second longer is inconceivable. And yet, at every turn one finds oneself resisting injustice and tyranny if for no other reason than that some things in this life cannot be permitted to stand. For surely anything that can be taken away will be, inevitably must be if one does not actively resist their being taken. Still, a purpose, a calling, is one thing, but I am not possessed of the fanatic’s heart. Indeed, I routinely have sought to dodge embranglement of that sort, the crusader’s sort, the zealot’s sort. How, then, I find myself so embroiled—it having fallen to me to be the spokesman for such an undertaking—is something I find only confounding. I flabbergast myself, a self that even now persists in believing that those who permit the personal to become political merit whatever form their come-uppance may assume. Perhaps a clue reposes in the distinction to be drawn between Cause and Dream. The moment when one’s dream becomes one’s cause. Perhaps the real peril, the more immediate danger, reposes in our dreams dreaming us. Pursuing us. Consuming us. I never sought the latter. I do not require such meaning. I require only latitude. The time, space and wherewithal to comport the more perfectly with my own nature. Autonomous nature. Sovereign nature. To exercise my fullest measure of self-dominion.
Somewhere only god knows where (call it Burnham’s Crossing; Colorado River country) lost in the limitless landscape 40 mapless miles west of San Felipe riding west toward Bejar, eight of my 26 recruits desert, go more missing than meridians in the night, into the night eight shapeless dwarves disappear dark as water under water absconding with arms and horses.
Goddamn them to no apparent purpose.
Eighteen men now. Down to 18. What am I to do with 18 men? These leftovers. Hold a parade? Form a coven? Mount a search party? Fucking discommodity. Christ!
Heading west on some misbegotten dead-end dead-of-winter destination death-mission, each mile feeling more ridiculous than the mile preceding, increasingly immune to deep feeling and cogent thought. Lucidity like scars.
Sure sheer in its shearing the wind here blows and blows. Does not cease blowing. A wolfhound of wind, a cante jondo incense-colored and high-howled. Blows and blows chiseling clockwise, counter-clockwise, fraught with punctures pleated with pockets through the whiffles of which a whistling wholesales wounded and raw. Invariably, unvaryingly, the wrong way.
Next morning breaking camp at crack of
brought up short by a solitary blue heron
stilt-stiff at my shoulder, silent assassin
bayonet bird lifting riparian through mist
parting sky to wings releasing altitude like silt
sifting soft
one feather at a time.
Travis Diary, Feb. 3, 1836:
Going by first impressions, how be impressed? For fuck sake! This so-called Alamo is a perfect ruin. Its trove of artillery notwithstanding—I am told it is mounted with some 20 cannon—it is little better than a sprawling, bat-infested dumpsite that the recent rains have rendered three acres of squalid swamp sump. Houston may be right after all. Why bother defending such a cagadero? Such a latrine. All the more so, as, so I have been informed, it has within the month been systematically stripped of horses, cattle, packmules, oxen, wagons and carts, looted of all clothing and bedding, all medical stores, all comestibles and potables, as well as most of its arms and munitions, the lot fetched off by a rogue element of its own garrison—some 200 armed men—more interested in abandoning their post here to adventure south after such spoils as might present themselves for the plucking than in sitting on their hands inside a stinking slopsink waiting for the enemy to appear. I find it difficult to blame them. At least Bowie has remained behind. He billets in town at his father-in-law’s palacio and has invited me to visit him there. He has been so good as to arrange for me to take a room on the Main Plaza in town, though from the little I have seen of the latter, it impresses me only slightly more than does this Alamo itself. I confess to doleful feelings, seek solace in Scott’s good words: “It is wonderful, what strength of purpose and bold energy of will are aroused by the assurance that we are doing our duty. One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years in which men steal through existence without honor.” I shall do my duty as it has fallen to me to do it. May God grant me the capacity to see it done. Meanwhile, here I am, down in the dumps, as far and farther than the eye can see.
I entered there, fucking tumbledown papist shambles, horsebacked Main Gate South, high noon higher, 42-degrees, peekaboo sun, prevailing westerlies By some unswerving punctuality of shambolic chance sucked
—suckered? I already had begun seriously to wonder—
Slanchwise through the four horned walls of the
New Real World
swallowed
stomached
surrounded
“Reporting for duty,”
saluting, rueing the listless day
Scenting sulfur
Chewing windcud
Eating manes of dust (they do not settle, never settle; they swish)
and being eaten in turn
Knew it the moment my boots bit ground
How life is briefer by the moment
How a man tires of being terrified of wishing too much to love his life
How becoming young once is just enough
How history has its own way of catching up with us
python, coiling
in perpetuity
Even as I found myself prevailed upon by the Alamo’s staunch-hearted 45-year-old commander, Clint Neill, Col. James Clinton Neill, the same responsible for touching off the first cannon shot of our revolution at Gonzales some four months past, I was so clutched by feelings of revulsion, inadequacy and dread, that I had all I could do to keep from decorating my boot tops with the acid-churned contents of my stomach. (Coffee negro, tortilla, fatback, green chiles, cracked frijoles, arroz cocido, god knows what.)
“It is imperative that I leave here at once, Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Leave, sir?”
“For now. A personal matter of the utmost importunatcy. My family. Wife and children. I only now am in re
ceipt of word from home. The plague.”
“I see. Yes, sir. Of course.”
“While I am away, for however long I am away, you, as ranking regular officer here, shall assume command of this place and of its garrison.”
“Yes, sir. Of course. As you think wise.”
“I do think wise, Lieutenant Colonel, and before I depart I intend to impress upon the men just how wise. I am heartily sorry to toss you into the breach this way, son, but have every confidence that you will acquit yourself honorably in the discharge of your duty. By the way, how old are you Lieutenant Colonel?”
“Twenty-six, sir. Twenty-seven come summer.”
“Ah. Well then, despite my reassurances, I should expect that at some point you are bounden to hear the inevitable grumblings issuing from certain quarters in that respect. My advice? Ignore it as best you can and permit the wisdom of your decisions to speak for itself. By and large these are good, decent, doughty men, most of them volunteers here on their own hook who have remained active in our cause despite suffering hardship and deprivation that would have sent lesser men packing long since, indeed did send some 200 packing, fully two-thirds of our complement here, a scant month past. Even so, while some few diehards may be aware of your reputation, they do not know you yet as they know me. All this to say, prepare to be sore-tested.”
“Thank you, sir. I pray that I shall meet and master any challenge as it may fall to me after the spirit of your own fine example. So when, sir, should we expect your return?”
“I should think less than a month, Lieutenant Colonel, perhaps a fortnight, no more.”
“Very good.”
“Until then you shall hold this outpost at all cost. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All cost.”
“All cost. Yes, sir. Of course. Meaning?”
“I should think Lieutenant Colonel that only time will tell, since time alone determines the measure of all things. Nothing could be clearer than that, if our cause is to crumble, it must only do so upon the barb of time. Borrowed time. Time’s speed, son, as you shall come to understand soon enough, is not God’s speed. It arrives as it will, passes by swift as horsemen swifter still, and once gone can be redeemed only by the blood of the fighting mad alone.”
“Yes, sir. Of course. Time. Blood. Madness. Always of the essence. So hurry back then, sir. Apresurese atras. Godspeed on your journey and may you find your family safe, recovered and thriving. Hurry back. At all cost. Por favor.”
Bowie
Bowie, which properly is pronounced Boo-ee, not Bo-ee or Bow-ee, greeted me at the ornately-carved double doors of his place in town just off La Plaza de las Islas on Calle Soledad. This being the former home of his recently deceased father-in-law, Tejas Vice-governor Juan Martín Veramendi.
Ah, Buck, come in, I recall him saying plush-facedly before clutching me by the shoulder by which in turn he tugged me companionably inside. Welcome to La Casa de Duendes, Colonel. As they say, lo que es mío es tuyo. What is mine is yours. Here. Let’s inside, out of the zaguán. A shade cool for the garden. We’ll pitch camp in the sala. I’ve a fire up and working.
Puffing more maniacally than not on his black cheroot, such dwindling stub as remained, he coughed, then again, something not insignificant catching or obstructing there. And again, yet again. Something stuck, cockleburred in his craw perhaps. Bending over, he grappled with, then gripped his patellas, the tussive coughing, racking him down deep. They sounded hurtful, those coughs, like they must hurt awfully, though they expressed no blood that I noticed, no clots or ropey dislodgements of any sort. Still, he looked….inclement. Hashy.
Uncommonly broad of shoulder, formidable of forehead and cheekbone, near-Romanish of nose and bullish of well-corded neck, his unshaven jaw was a worn-and-torn jut, a prow that appeared to have been there and done that, seen it all before and been repeatedly around the roughshod block before coming back for more.
Perdoname, he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand while studying at arm’s length the indentured cheroot and its ascendant smoke coil.
You should really see to that, I said.
What the mezcal’s for, he said. Here, and motioned me to sit.
Lowering myself in graduated stages into the intricately embroidered, thick-cushioned chair, I noticed that the carvings of its legs, arms, and back were of a match with those of the massive front doors.
He was clad en deshabille in a mustard-colored nightgown and pair of elaborately strappy, hemp-woven huaraches. A strong man, I thought to myself, if one no longer so strong as I remembered him from our several encounters back in San Felipe where he had enlisted my offices to see to the thornier details of a number of speculatively problematic, if never less than visionary land grabs. He carried himself now with a ruined dignity; nothing could have been clearer than that the glory, if not the fight, had left his once-indomitable body.
The hammered gravel, cobble-floored parlor where we sat—the floor was…crumbly, crusty with sands and granular sediments; you crunched when you walked—was bereft of furniture save our lonely pair of his-and-her chairs, between which stood an oblong end-table atop which squatted his half-filled jar of mezcal and the customary jicara, the calabash half-gourd from which the liquor ritually is drunk. A tall—six, six-and-a-half, seven-foot—lophocereus schottii cactus, dead or momentarily to be, drooped at a severely saddened angle against a wall in a far corner.
He had a mesquite-fed fire roaring in the mantel-less fireplace directly across from us, above which hung an uncommonly large, elaborately framed oil portrait of a decidedly gaunt, but as the expression goes, “beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed Spanish maiden,” wearing a black dress surmounted by a delicately crocheted, white lace gorget and a winsomely sad, Mona Lisa smile; comely yet melancholic. Squinting with a closed left eye, I measured its breadth and height with a furtive thumb.
A beagle-colored, flop-eared, noticeably flea-bitten perro sprawled warming before the fire upon its elongated back, softly snoring. Basset, I believe the breed is called. When Bowie noticed me noticing it, he remarked, “Lucy. Old gal now. Part blind. Deaf as a post. Ursula’s from a pup. All I have left. All I have left of her.”
I smelled the liquor on his breath, though he did not yet reek of being soaked in it as he so often did; it was no secret that he and Houston often got drunk together. Before becoming too ill to do so, Bowie drank regularly, too regularly. Not that he did not have cause. He had lost more than just his wife and her family when the cholera had taken them. He had lost what he called his “will to love.”
I had heard that the place had gone largely to seed since the death of the Veramendis some 30 months earlier. Certainly it no longer was the showplace it once reputedly had been. There were, I noticed, enough cobwebs in evidence to weave a quilt, though as far as I could tell, it was not infested with tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, bats or other, less recognizable vermin. Hives and hibernacles of shadow nested in the corners.
“This house is haunted you know,” he said of a sudden. “My wife and in-laws still inhabit the place. I hear them knocking about at night. I don’t mind. Find it comforting.”
What is haunted, I thought to myself, is Jim Bowie. The attic and cellar of his soul.
Gazing into the flames, their light-throw flickering the features of his face, a face as morose as any I ever had seen, he leaned sharply forward, rocked some in his chair, shook his head. “Goddamn fucking plague! My own Ursula….” He faltered.
“I know,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“Takes it out of you,” he said. “Devil’s work. Pound of flesh. Takes the best of you with it. Will to love. Kills that off too.”
“Pardon?”
“Will to love, Buck, will to love.” Glanced then at the portrait, glister-eyed. “All worthwhile there for awhile, while she still…We believe she was with child, you know.”
“No,” I said. “I did not know.”
“Hell of it is, could be I d
idn’t love her when I married her. Not enough. Intended to, wanted to, but it was the opportunity, a proposition, a transaction. I was marrying into her family, you see. But then, well, it became something else. For the both of us. Became…more. And it still was, becoming, more. More of whatever it still was going to become. We’d got past the beginnings and were getting started, re-started, when…”
A silence, one just long enough to be awkward. Apparently he was leaving it to me. “El cuchillo,” I finally said, unable to cobble together anything more inspired or less insipid, referencing his Florida-sized hand-to-hand combat and/or entrenching tool-cum-phallic totem, that legendary, gleaming, 14-inch-long membrum virile giganticus.
“Yes?”
“Notice you’re not wearing it. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you so naked. So to say.”
“No. Never do around the place. Ursula wouldn’t have it. Or her folks. Considered it uncivilized. House rules. Got into the habit of going around without. Second nature now. Damn thing’s a fucking mortification to lug around all day anyway. First thing I do when I walk through that door”—he nodded in the direction—“unbuckle and unbelt. Feels like getting out of jail. Ever since the Sandbar Scrape. Ever tell you about the Sandbar Scrape, Buck? One helluva to-do, that.”
He had told me about the Sandbar Scrape. More than once, actually. Countless times, actually. He told anyone who would listen and not a few who wouldn’t. And why not? Prior to that “chance medley” duel—more accurately, free-for-all brawl—on that spit of land in the Mississippi up above Natchez almost a decade earlier, he had been little but West Louisiana’s shiftiest fortune-hunting slave-trafficker. Subsequent to it, once that four-against-one affray was written up in newspapers from New Orleans to New York City, his reputation as the proverbial man not to be trifled with spread throughout the Southwest. Not that he didn’t suffer for his having been twice lungshot, bad skull-fractured, and sword-stabbed seven times, wounds that in a lesser man would have proved mortal upon the spot. Took him a year and a half to recover, and, it was only too apparent, he never had done so fully. Not near.
