This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  Swaying some in place, I bent slightly forward at the waist and leaned full-faced into the full-faced wind, my right leg firmly planted, my left somewhat less so, the knee of the latter canted, the hip of the former cocked, though not eccentrically; contrapposto. Coupled with the rakish angle at which I had corniced my hat, I cut, as I considered it, a rather Hogarthian figure, one not unillustrative of his classic, “Line of Beauty.” And this only underscored and reinforced the performative, or theatrical, sense of the moment.

  “What I wish to say, men,” I said, raising my voice to its limit, “what you need to hear and digest, is that we are out, I mean all out of both time and hope. Can you hear me? In the back there? Yes? No? Louder still? All right.

  “I need not tell you that the enemy presses nearer our walls each day, nor that no reinforcements shall be reaching us. We have been abandoned to suffer our fate on our own, the truth of which is that the enemy outnumbers us 30 to one and if we choose to remain here and resist, we shall be crushed. Doubt it not. Murdered to a manjack.

  “It is the numbers, you see. Six-thousand of them, 200 of us, 250 of us. Words may lie, numbers, even those as imprecise as the ones available to us, do not. Our exact number does not matter. What matters is that that number is insufficient, laughably so.”

  Pacing back and forth, to and fro before them, I prayed that, as I did so, my stride might appear more surefooted than it felt.

  “I have written my soul out. For the past fortnight, I have written plea after plea, appeal after appeal, jeremiad after cri de coeur. I have dispatched two dozen couriers to broadcast our plight pillar to post. But now, now my well is run dry, my quill is quit, and my words—there no longer can linger a question—have been ignored. They have failed to rouse our brethren. And about that”—I reined up then, full stop, swallowing hard around the risen fist in my throat—“I am sorry. More sorry than you can know. My words have failed you, as I have failed them.”

  A roundelay of muttering rippled through the assembled, until at some length a voice called out, “No siree, Colonel. You ain’t failed nobody. You give her all you got. You give her yer all. You give her hell. No man coulda done her more or better. This fix here ain’t yer fault.”

  This, I don’t mind saying, moved me. I was genuinely moved. “Why….I….I thank you, soldier, but I cannot agree. As your commander, the fate of this place, as likewise the future of Texas, is my responsibility and no one else’s. That is just the fact, one that merits neither qualification nor stinting.

  “The situation, then, is this. That should you wish to leave, then now, tonight, may be your last, best opportunity to do so. No one doubts your grit, but pluckluck and spit gets you only so far. No one is going to think less of you should that be your decision. Wait until dark, and then”—I gestured to my left, toward the Palisade, that low stretch of earth-staken timber pales—“shag it up and over the walls and into the chaparral beyond.

  “As our intelligence places 500 of the enemy’s cavalry out there on patrol night and day, armed with their damn nine-foot-long lanzas, it serves no honest purpose to pretend that the odds of your escaping unharmed are not stacked highly in your favor, but I leave that calculation to you.” I paused. “But please, gentlemen, I admonish you, do calculate carefully.”

  Though remaining planted to a man in place, I noticed that at this, many of them ducked their heads, clawed their scalps, bunched their shoulders, scuffled their toes, rubbed absently at their necks and midsections and houghed and spit some in the dust as they glanced nervously sidelong in silence each to the other. Nothing could have been clearer to me at that moment than that they were torn, afflicted with every manner of mixed emotion. And why not? They may for the most part have been hopelessly illiterate, but a flock of imbeciles would have reacted no differently.

  “What you need to know,” I continued, “is that no finger shall be lifted by any man here to impinge upon or impede any who might wish to roll their dice in that fashion, and Vaya con dios, y mi bendición.”

  It was then that I found myself inexplicably imagining overhead the zopilotes, the buzzards that had yet to appear in anticipation of what they uncannily must already have sensed was the imminent end of us. In my mind’s eye, they circled absent queedle or complaint, their eerie silence rendering them more menacing than had they gabbled like a clutch of scrummaging magpies. Theirs, I could not help thinking, could only be the premonitory patience of those creatures who wait upon the transpiration of calamity, scenting the rot of death upon the winds of the very air they travel.

  “So then, as clear and as simple as I can make it. Stay and fight—and die. Run away—and die anyway. Or, or”—I paused a moment, prolonged moment, protracted moment, permitted the prospect of what I was about to say sufficiently to penetrate—“remain here and solicit the enemy for terms of our surrender.”

  I waited. Not a mutter, not a mumble, not a murmur.

  “Know, men, that I do not undertake this decision lightly. I have pondered the matter at length, considerable, patriotic length, and while I do not know that the enemy will condescend to offer us such terms, much less honor them if he does, it may, there being no viable other, be an avenue worth further exploration.

  “It is, all said, I grant you, a most forlorn and desperate measure, but my primary object, as it must be, is to save as many lives as possible. Your lives. To salvage what we can, strike a bargain that ensures some form of clemency short of our annihilation, and retire from this field with honor. Were I to do anything less, I would be derelict in my duty as your commander.”

  Still, to my surprise, nothing but silence.

  “And so we arrive at the reason for my summoning you here. To alert you to my decision to propose to our enemy an honorable secession to these hostilities. Let us pray that he has the good sense to accept it, for if he does not, it is my intention to make him pay most dearly on account. Indeed, should it come to it, I promise you that we shall hurt him, wound him, bleed him so badly that the ashes of his victory will taste to him more bitter, more pyrrhic, than could any conceivable defeat.”

  It was quiet enough to hear what I took for the rush of the wind shredding the clouds to sawdust, when of a sudden, the familiar KA-BOOM!—distinctly louder these days owing to the enemy’s cannon having over the past fortnight drawn that much nearer the walls—was followed by the no less familiar redhot whiz, whoosh and whistle, the siss of a cannonball whortling high over our heads, before crashing harmlessly into the corral in the vicinity of the latrines along the East Wall.

  “Ah,” I ventured less matter-of-factly than bemusedly. “I do believe that they continue to gun for us. Potshots—or ought I say, potty.” Then tried to smile.

  “It is no secret, “I continued, “that Santa Anna is possessed of all the scruples of a whoremonger. This is a creature who has the temerity to proclaim not only that, ‘Hombre es nada; poder es todo’: Man is nothing; power everything, but that, ‘So yo fuera Dios, me gustaria ser mas’: If I were God, I would wish to be more. They do not call him El Carajote, The Big Prick, for nothing.”

  As intended, this occasioned a wave of uneasy laughter, though it was quickly spent. “That we must rely upon such a man to honor our request, is most discouraging. Frankly, I would sooner woo a scorpion. But”—I shrugged—“when one finds oneself hived in hell, the only way out—there can be no other—is headfirst through the devil’s own door.”

  Coming Through Slaughter, I recited to them,

  seldom is easy—

  it gets pitched

  where dear friends

  dare not

  follow

  dear friends

  let the future storm—

  it will eat its own

  soon enough.

  “So then boys, for now, let us back up on the walls. Ears cocked, eyes peeled, peckers hard, powder dry. Prayers, if you’ve a mind, always welcome. And remember, men, that everyone, no exceptions, lives a life of scars to some extent. No one’s
suffering is of a higher order than anyone else’s. We all got raw ordeals.

  “Meanwhile, cosecha de la fuerza de la noche, busque refugio en la tormenta. Harvest strength from the night, seek shelter in the storm. We soldier on.”

  Gazing past, past or through the glaze of my looking glass, I could not help but reflect that over the course of the past fortnight I miserably had failed to keep up appearances. I gradually was losing touch with my recollection of myself. As if a mirror like a poem might be something to hide in or pass through, transfigured.

  White of the page. Silver of the mirror.

  How many doors will this man open

  Realm of the image. Regime of mirage.

  And stand with his skull against the light

  Could I reach him across the pane of such a space? Was that possible? Did I wish to? Peel off his image? Chip it with a chisel? (Letting him fall where he might, bent backward, slantwise, simulacrum reversed!) Pour my arm through its sheet of sheer silver, clutching what I could sleeved to mercury. Strain him nickeled out the tin of the tain to bathe him the recombitant color of star? Clean as chrome.

  There is little enough to make of any of this but the inevitable shatter. The way life fractures, falls apart before it occurs, its walls collapsed, full-measured with blood. When the mirror cracks and you trip, slit your neck open snik! deep-wide upon its shards, what difference then? The image bleeds no less surely than the man. Astonished, you stare, disbelieving. Blood stares back at you.

  That makeshift masked man going through his mis-spent motions arranging his cravat in the mica of his mirror has left one duty only: to die, estranged, alone, holding back that which cannot be held. And, meantime, come the chemical dark of the cobalt moon, live another day closer to death.

  Outpatient

  With what I construed for the end now all too clearly in sight, we were running low on victuals. Down to bed of seed corn.

  To the rear of the compound’s hospital on the second floor of the Convento along the East Wall (then filled to overflowing with the sick and injured), was a low-walled backyard or corral, perhaps 100 by 200 feet, and it was there on the evening of March 4th, what I in any event took for March 4th, that I stumbled purely by hazard upon one of our men—name known, but in the moment, try as I might to haul it up, unavailable to me—shambling aimlessly barefoot and bare-arsed, makeshift hospital smock flappling in the breeze.

  Approaching the poor fellow with the intention of gently reproaching him back to infirmary, as I sidled nearer stepping purposely around a cannonball-blasted, buzzard-ravaged beeve’s head, I could see that the poor soul’s eyes were peculiarly bright with fever—mooncalf-bright, I thought to myself—even as they sought and failed to find, darting this way, goggling that, barrel-rolling in their sockets.

  It was not until I spoke up—“Now soldier, what have we here?”—that the wretch seemed at all aware of my presence. At the sound of my voice, he plunged to his knees, pawed at something in the dirt, scooped it up and raised it to his mouth before stuffing it inside, commencing wolfishly to chew, or rather, chomp, which is to say gum it, for as I was quick to discern, he had not a tooth left in his head. Indeed, the gums themselves, which were so swollen that they bulged beyond his lips, were intervaled with irregular gaps where the gingiva had sloughed away or broken off completely. In consequence, his lower jaw, the little of it left intact, required that it be cradled loosely in place by a ratty strip of oily rag slung beneath his chin, then drawn up, over and tied in a rabbity-eared looking bow atop his head.

  Retrieving the item from him—it entailed no little struggle, weak as he was, to wrest it from his jaws—I noticed that it was a discarded, flaxseed, meal-and-lard oil, muslin poultice, what commonly was called a mush poultice of the sort typically used to treat boils, lesions and pustules. Its saturated underside was smeared pus-yellow and yolk-bloody.

  “Give it back,” the poor soul managed, jaws click-clacketting as he somehow wrestled himself wobbling to his feet.

  His age I found impossible to peg. He might have been as young as myself, he likely was older by half. His flesh was jaundiced and the color of jaundice and he smelled more than slightly unpleasant.

  “I mean to et that thar,” he said. “I a-spied her first. That thar’s mine by rights of first finder. You’ve no proper claim to her. You go and give her on back now. You give a man a meal. You show a man some mercy.”

  Each word was as the grinding of a gear, bone-on-bone gear.

  “About that you are perfectly correct,” I replied evenly. “I have no claim, nor do I desire one. But if I permit you to….et it, you will be dead before morning, your death will not be pleasant, I will have been complicit in having hastened it, and that can and will not happen.

  “Besides, I cannot spare you just now. I need you son. I need you to fight against those Mex. I need you with me to go against Santana.”

  He stared at me, a study in incredulity. “You don’t unnerstan’ nuthun, do ya? I’m a-dead where I stand. You hear’t them lungs?” His chest was a coffin of croup. “Now you look me all up and down. This here’s a dead man yer talkin’ to, boy. You think I’m a-leavin’ here alive? I got the shits too bad, my teeth is all falled out, my eyes is going fast, and the gang-green’s got aholt too far down to stanch ’er on back.”

  Lifting the hem of his gown above his head, he exposed the flesh rot that had spread its bismuth-and-bitumen corrosion yoke-like along his shoulders, sludging all down his arms to his biceps. From the base of his neck to the tuck of his armpits he looked—“torched” was the word that occurred to me. Sphacelated. I tried not to look away.

  “See? What’d I tell ya? Don’t matter. Them Mex don’t matter none to me.” His hacking was rackled with bloody phlegm. “I’m a goner any whichaway. All that matters is I got me a powerful hunger”—he pointed to the poultice clutched in my hand—“and that thar’s as right a meal I’ve had since can’t say when. And iff ’n it’s my last”—he shrugged—“suits me. Cuz I’ve about had enough of this here nuthun’, sonny boy. Had my fill. All a man can stand.”

  His rheumy eyes were a wound of pleading.

  “Seen that dog?” he said suddenly glancing nervously about.

  “Pardon?”

  “That dog. Seen it anywheres? Run off, must of. Spooked it. You did.”

  “Dog?” We had none there, not a pooch; Bowie had not brought along the Basset. “Afraid not, son. No dog.”

  “It was here all right. I was set to et on it. Dogs is devil smart. Up and found hisself a hidey-hole, musta.”

  I knew neither where to go nor what to do with this. “What kind, could you say?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The dog. Can you describe it?”

  “Dog?”

  “The one you say you saw.”

  “Why? You seen it?” He paused. “Say, you fixin’ on ett’n that thar?”

  “All right, son, all right. Here then.” Handing back the poultice, I turned, and, without a backward glance, hastened off, resisting the impulse to wipe my hand down my pants leg.

  I had no tears left, no sorrow, but I did have a hunch. I had a hunch that for some of us, it was not so easy being dead. I had a hunch that being dead was infinitely more difficult, a far more complicated affair for some than it was for others. And that this poor fellow, this forsaken soul, the one I had just as much as murdered, did not really exist. That he was a ghost. A shade. A wraithing. One that, come morning, I would have forgotten all about.

  As would he.

  Not a single suicide. Surprisingly. Not yet. Just madness. Rampant as wishes.

  Emerging at noontide, I churned muck across the compound’s courtyard spoked with men spooked and armed to their hilts before halting hubwise for a moment bareheaded in the rainblow to stare straight up at a sky reefed with clouds close as roofs and shake a fist at the facts that sharked there. Left-handed fist.

  Pitched right into a world of wrong until the wrong is wrung, rifted, burled
, contrary to nature. Your own as well, I thought, standing there staring straight up, rain siphoning off my face, maniac tongues down my neck licking inside my shirtfront.

  I thought: a man could go mad leashed to certain facts, entangled in their net of amber.

  Standing there soaked through as laundry in the isinglass rain, it occurred to me that I never had fared well in their company, facts. Fallen in line with, genuflected before, saluted the facts the world had handed me. Would have me have. Encumber me with. The ones amassed outside these walls. Their machinery of bone. Debrided bone.

  Handed half a chance I knew they would wrestle sky to earth. Gnaw down the sun. Grind star to sand. I knew they would nail the world, wafer to a wall. Or blast it back to bedrock. Until there was nothing. Nothing left. Not even chalkdust. Just/fact.

  I preferred my own. To wand them left-handed sphinxed from spindrift, or wholecloth riddled from floss.

  Now, Santa Anna, He Mother-born to Give and Not Take Orders, was a man of fact. Donned them like cladding, armor, Saurian armor. Those of the world, the one he strode, the one he strutted, irreducible, irremediable, literal as carbon.

  Facts hate, and handed half a chance will not hesitate to kill you, pursue you even beyond the grave. Uncoffin your corpse, drag it to hell, kick it in the teeth, hand you your head, hang you by your heels, meathooked leftfooted as the deadweight of God.

  Facts are the enemy. Facts are soul-less. Facts are the Devil’s façade.

  Travis Diary, March 5, 1836:

  68 degrees. Clear. I have dispatched Mrs. Juana Alsbury, the late Ursula Bowie’s sister, who for the past week has so selflessly been vetting the suppurant, impossibly contagious Colonel Bowie, with our proposal of surrender to Santa Anna. I presently await her return with the reply which will determine our course henceforward. We are prepared, either way, to lay down our arms, or to die fighting wielding those arms to the last. Earlier, I encouraged those who wished to leave here to do so before it is too late. I am aware of but one of our number who so chose. In truth, there are moments when I wish I was that man. Oh, to be possessed of the freedom to hotfoot it on cloven hoof! Idle wish! The only question now is whether surrender will be enough to mollify our enemy. In truth, I suspect not. I suspect that he is intent upon our murder as a declaration of his policy of pogrom and extermination, that he proposes to use our deaths as an example, an object lesson, a bloody warning that he is prepared to lay waste to one and all. In this, his effort to intimidate and overawe, he badly miscalculates. While to their everlasting shame our friends and neighbors will not be stirred to succor us, I cannot think that our deaths will do else but rouse them, if not in the name of Texas, then in that of exacting a most violent and personal revenge. Santa Anna does not know them, the way they rile, the capacity of their spine, but he soon shall learn, and then hell to pay and no pitch hot. Meanwhile, the doctor, Pollard, informs me that he expects Colonel Bowie to moan his last upon the instant; there no longer exists a shred of hope for his recovery. Well, every war records its waste; perhaps the only true measure of victory is how one lives on or fails to in the face of defeat. What is it that we most dread about death anyway? Is it not, perhaps, that once gone, once absented, we—and all that our lived lives once meant, to us if to no one else—shall be not only forgotten as if we never existed, but that insofar as we are remembered, we will be gotten wrong? Misconstrued. Behind our back. That the undertaker will part our hair on the wrong side while mis-spelling Travis, Travers? And no one remaining who gives a dry enough fuck to correct him. We all fear being plotted against after we have been planted. You die, are dead to the world, only to have that world remember you, immortalize, in error. A fabrication. Gross fiction. A lie. Death always is less final than forgetting.