This Way Slaughter
Page 18
Let us talk about how nothing lasts, whether mission or fortress—how fossilize fear?—prison or charnel house—frame gore in a mirror?—outpost, citadel, indefensible lair, how nothing is enshrined frozen in time, not even history’s hoofprints….
“It is easier to raise a shrine
than bring the deity down to haunt it.”
….save nothing, the nothing more that breeds more nothing, each life post-mortem the moment it’s lived, waiting for the end mothed in the silence of smoke thicker than heat and as tall. (And you thought, how quaint, that there was less than an infinitude of ways to butcher the world or embolden its madness, simply by wielding words like weapons powerless as any poetry?)
Let us talk about how your own death dazzles me. All these years later. Still does. And how it keeps on dying, posthumously gasping for air in those pockets trapped between dream and deed. Nothing like one’s last breath—eh?—to rouse one’s second wind, year after year after book after book after page after page of superfluous words wrung dry of their drama, leaving what passes for a present, pyrrhic in its passing, the past your public pants for. While you, aghast at their applause, can only recall how much of everything must be forgotten, to remember anything at all.
“History is the splitting of heads to powder….We mutilate and call it wisdom.”
Let us talk about what any of us wouldn’t give for a little well-earned obscurity. To be granted quittance enough to go unrecognized. Inside an occluding shadow, perhaps, or plunged down some pitfall gray as monotony and thinner than ellipsis above the fray, beyond harm’s way, where what matters ceases to matter, and the adulators hold no sway, content to do one’s anonymous time by hourly killing it.
I have a question for you (you need not answer it): Is it the dead who walk with the living, or the living who wander the dead? (Should not what is buried stay buried?) And you? Where are you? Hmm? Hiding? Hidden indelibly immune to transcursion, illegibly far-flung beyond your furthest inscrutable framing? As when fabrication extracts fact, the syntax of which nightly shifts in what room, upon what shelf, inside what urn, its ashes strewn between the pages of what book, sifting through the lyric of what tune.
Let us talk about your leaving some remnant behind. A heartstring, perhaps, a fallen tear or rueful gaze cast back to the callow youth you once forsook to pilgrim out armor-clad and chivalrously cursed, in thrall to a calling archaic, apocryphal, to a fate as self-created as self-coerced, one gantlet-run through the worst of all worlds.
Let us talk about memorializing a hero manqué whose feats were made of clay, and the way lies become legends and legends survive; the way myths multiply mystifies me. You? Too?
“You have to remember the past rather clearly if you are going to lie your way out of its existence, but you also have to be able to enter your new history so completely that it replaces the truth even in your own mind.”
I have another question for you (and expect an answer): Why is it always the worst that gets reprised? The wars we most remember? The massacres that wound the worst? Why all that joyless wickedness we most rehearse? Because, confess, that was just bad medicine, muy mal, all around. Tejas the body sickened, and you the surgeon assigned to saw her stem to stub, carve a collop of her corpus, some gyre of ground, a plat of plot to carry off deployed to free the amputee though it kill her stump by lopped-off stump.
Let us talk about how Man is thirsty and Life is drought. About how there is no asylum inside, no amnesty without. About how you made your life, and now must lie in it. Your death, and now must live with it, absent doubt. Not for a cause; hell, fuck the cause. But because you don’t have to believe in death, to die.
“It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.”
(There should be one spectacular of ruin, red, mid-tragedy.)
for
(Often falling stars describe the incoherent… While life bashes us thank God with colors.)
One moment I was asleep on my cot in my quarters midpoint along the West Wall half-dead to the world, the next I was jarred half-awake still on my cot in my West Wall quarters
immersed in pitch-darkness. Jolted roughly half-awake on my cot in the dark in my quarters by a noise, an uncommonly loud if still distant noise or fugue of noises, a tantrum of noises the exact nature of which, because I was not yet fully awake, still sleep-muddled, left me befuddled and disoriented, feeling held oddly at arm’s length while somehow melting against myself. This certain…remoteness.
But only for a moment. Because in the next moment, or perhaps in the moments immediately following, the succeeding next few, as I began in starts and fits to collect my wits, gather my bearings and find my firmer footing, as my head cleared and eyes focused and I swung fully dressed from my cot, rank, ripe, and radish-eyed onto my heel-worn, booted feet, it quickly became apparent that the noise, or, rather, the meaning of the noise—for it remained to me a diffuse if volumizing, rataplanned drumble despite my distinctly hearing a fair lot of banshee-style shrieking as well as successive round upon round of whoosheting and whistling—the meaning of the noise was that, as I exclaimed aloud, “Fuck! ¡Cono! We must be under attack!”
¡La hora de la hora esta aqui!
Why, who knows, but as I yawned en seriatum, my mother’s words came to me sudden as a gunshot. I heard her voice, if not her syntax, her voice, my syntax, a bark of clarity inside my head: “Pay attention to everything, William. Pay attention to each element of any situation. Isolate each element in high relief. Examine each element from a variety of angles letting the truth emerge moment to moment upon its own unbidden slant.”
My shotgun, Nock gun, the Hellblaster, leaned loaded against the wall at the head of the cot. Fetching it up, I called to Joe. Or tried to, for the words stuck, frog. I had to clear my throat before calling again for him to follow me out the door, “and bring the back-up,” my Jaeger double-barrel carabina.
Frankly, I half-expected him to hang back. It was lost on neither of us, after all, that those bent upon my murder were citizens of a nation the constitution of which guaranteed Joe his freedom. If I had been Joe—well, I do not know what I would have done if I were Joe. I imagine I would have been mightily miffed, sorely conflicted, all the more so as our own just then published provisional Texas constitution contained the passages, not a word of which Joe, of course, was capable of reading:
All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude.
Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them; nor shall Congress have power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his or her slaves; nor shall any free person of African descent be permitted to reside in the republic.
As in the dark I shagtailed the 75 yards across the courtyard to the North Wall—I could not, I suddenly realized, feel my sleep-fruzzled feet; null set—I noticed that Joe, God bless him, God bless that boy, unhesitatingly, even eagerly was hard upon my heels.
And that the sky was scarred with fire, scabbed with fire. That the sky was arc-streaked with the horsetailed contrails of what I took for Congreve rocket fire.
I no longer recall mounting the 51-foot ramp to the loft-up of the North Wall. I must have, because the next I knew, I was atop the North Wall loft-up. Nor do I recall any Mexican bugles blaring the hair-raising fanfaronade of El Deguello, the ancient Moorish battle tune known as, “The Throat-slitting.” Nor any Mexican war cries, whether that of, “¡Vive Santa Anna mi dios de la guerra y justicia!” or “¡Los gringos son hijos de putas!” or “¡Muerte a los diaglos Tejanos!” Hell, I do not even recall myself shouting as I ran, although it is said that that is what I did, “Come on, boys! To your stations! The Mex are upon us and we must only give them hell! ¡No rendirse, muchachos!”
What I do remember remembering while standing up there, up on the lof
t-up, was the sense of being suspended 1,000 feet in the air amidst some ambit of cataclysm while our own cannon, those to either side of me, up-belched, out-roared and disgorged from the mouths of their muzzles the pro forma fan of superheated langrage—this sprayed, hotshot stew of scrap metal, stray shotting, horseshoes, nails, chainlink, belt buckles, pocket watches, door hinges, crumpled pots and pans, shard of metal kettle, what-all and what-not. I also remember how, despite the convulsive, concussive, utterly deafening detonative discharges, how dead quiet everything was. I might have been a million miles away.
I have heard it said that the silence of God is God. So, then, perhaps it was a blessing that I recollect so little, or the little that I do, so vaguely, indistinctly, with such a blurred paucity of detail. Strange, the wonderments available to those who seek the certain higher places, or, being sought, avail themselves thereof inside the summitry of the sky. But then, I was too busy at the time for such lofty thoughts, busy craning my neck and canting at the waist and, upon chancing a quick peek down over the wall, discerning through the darkness little but a swarm of movement bottlenecked at its base, this churn of humanity hived to a single, undifferentiated mass hurling itself, so my impression, like a battering ram against the wall’s bulkhead while groping for such handholds and footholds and toeholds as might be afforded by the denticulated timbering of its reticulated façade.
It was a sight that, while I cannot account for the impulse even now, prompted in me the profound desire to drop trou and unleash upon their prettily beplumed and hatted heads, their resplendent gherkin green, pom-pommed, impossibly shiny black leather shakos, a lantrifying hot-arcing torrent of steaming micturation. A piss, as it were, into the Abyss. Which, after considering it for a moment, purely delightful moment, what I so wished to do, I to my eternal regret mustered the wherewithal to resist doing.
Men all along the loft-up were bellowing curses and imprecations even as they were being shot at and/or down, the latter falling backwards or pitching forwards or reeling sidewise before plunging from the platform to the ground below, more than a few pissing and beshatting themselves as they did so. Still others were hemorrhaging from their cranial vaults, or exsanguinating unto hypovolemia in dehiscent outstrewings, while the few who remained alive continued to heap their charred hands with improvised metal stuffing to load and reload the cannon in order to cannonade again and some more and some more again.
I smelled burnt flesh. Lacerated and burst intestine. Ate smoke, tasted blood, spat shit, or swallowed it.
Fingers were clipped off. Hands were cleaved off. Arms and legs were clopped off.
Faces and partial faces were blown clean away. Remnants of jawbone and face pulp, tongues and teeth hurtled this way and that in salmon-tinged flurries. Flesh and fatty bits of mesentery and omentum flumed the air like fumes. A segment of windpipe and chunk of calvarium whapped me flush across my left zygoma. Followed by, I might have sworn, a cremaster.
I heard myself scream at myself. “Run! What are you waiting for?” And again, “They have ladders, scaling ladders! They have crowbars and pickaxes and sledgehammers and their bayonets are three feet long!”
But I did not run. I could not run. I could have run, but I did not run. Because that was not my role here. That was not the part I had been bequeathed to play, the part I was assigned, which was to be dauntless and redoubtable and do what I was supposed to do: face the cut-throat music, look death square in the eye and refuse to blink, grit my teeth, smile awhile and stand my ground, to die self-sacrificed first to the foremost, or refrain from same as long as one of my men yet remained alive.
I glanced around, around the loft-up, left, right, front, back. My God! Where was everyone?
Where were Wash Cottle and Wash Main? Where were Will Wills, Free Day and Man Shied? Sixteen-year-old Gal Fuqua, where was he? Tap Holland, Gee Pagan, and Dolph Floyd, Tug Daggert and old Gumball Perkins, where were they? And where was Chas Zanco of Randers, Denmark, who had traveled farther than any of us here to have his hopes scotched and dreams dashed?
Joe, God bless him, was there, but everyone else was not there. Everyone else was gone. Had gone. Vanished. Up and disappeared. Or was dead. Or dying. I was there and Joe was there and no one else was there. No one who remained alive.
I see myself leaning far out over the wall, daredeviling its edge, acrobatically straining as far as I could, half-hanging there trapezed by my knees—no net, harness, no dry runs. I see myself aiming the seven brazed barrels of the Nock gun directly downwards at the writhing mass of manhood at its base and squeezing the trig …
… up from out of the maelstrom below, propulsed by way of an India pattern Brown Bess British surplus musket at 600 to 1,000 feet per second, a .35 caliber buckball sucked the very eyes out of the air before it crashed into my cranium lifting me off my feet and spinning me clean around as it punched a divot in my forehead just large enough to accommodate a quilltip.
The shot could only have been one in a million, the outcome of cockeyed blind chance, the longest of long shots. Not that it mattered. Indeed, nothing could have mattered less, for even after all these years, it remains in every detail exactly the same: all predictable, all inevitable, all as wrong as wrong could be or ever was. (Before I so much as hit the ground, the rumors had begun. Even as I sensed my sphincter unpuckering, the rumors were gaining traction with friend, foe and stranger alike. That I had taken my own life. That the wound was too clean, too dead-centered, too neatly configured and tidily arranged, as if by design too purposefully, premeditatively singular to be the handiwork of other than that perpetrated by my own hand.)
Knee-buckled, I sagged, almost went down, staggered one, two, three steps before pitching forward and collapsing against the barrel of one of the cannon in advance of sliding slowly to the ground clawing the empty air, pawing the planked deck, laboring to haul myself to a sitting posture while notching my spine against the cannon’s wheel.
I felt my hands convulse to doorknobs; subsultus. Felt myself dying on cue. Labored, even as they insisted upon closing, to keep my eyes open, as for the last time, they closed.
Can I say now what they saw then? At that moment?
I can try.
I can say that at last I saw that the dead are not like everyone else, that it was as if someone not alive was speaking: “Relax. What must be borne is only the unbearable, what suffered only the insufferable. Steady as you go. You’re going. You’re gone.”
I can say that my eyes saw me dying in the dark at dawn, dying dingily, in obscurity, forsaken by my fellow countrymen, sacrificed not upon an altar, but a tumbledown dumpsite in the middle of a moon-cratered slag field engulfed by pitchblende darkness, while from North Wall to South, East Wall to West, an uncadenced carnage of over-determined cruelty ripsawed a mile a minute through every quoin and corner, cousy and crawlspace of that three-acre compound until everyone was dead at once, every last one, and I was left alone no longer gasping for breath in the gunpowder smoke and atomized bloodmist and attar of inside-out intestine in the atavistic dark of a reddened meatyard of human strewage, a sargasso of blood, lymph, chyle and chime, synovia, serousium and fluids peritoneal and cerebrospinal to tumble toward something so deplenished that no throb or pulse, flicker or twitch persisted.
I can say that, and I can say that there was no radiance. That there was a singular absence of radiance. Or should you wish, call it splendor. There was none of that. Or glory. No radiance, no splendor, no glory. Only a presence, the emanating, enveloping, overwhelming presence of all that is the opposite of radiance and splendor and glory.
And grace.
What did I see? I saw the skull beneath my skin. Shot through. Shattered. Bone-blasted. The end of thought; debris. A tousled dark, its darkness wet as rain. As any sea.
I saw the end of me:
Souring alongside the sun.
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This conglomerate stillness
So now, if you will, p
ause a moment.
Consider and reflect.
Ponder it well.
Contemplate awhile.
Think/hard.
Is there anything in this world more rending
than the sounds of human slaughter
uncoupled from words?
And then, likethat, of a sudden
everywhere
all-at-once
the sound of stopped
breathing,
throughout a vast space
a resonant silence more silent than
the silence of stars.
He is dead then. The young man is dead. And so, being dead, is spared the affront of the Mexican soldados—themselves young, most of them, young as himself, younger than himself—who blunder up and pour over the North Wall and then over the other walls and spill into and overspread the compound and rout and kill everyone, butcher his entire command letting enough blood to slosh in, save the 62 or 66, roughly a quarter of the whole who scramble and phutscutter outside to the south and east and to a man are ridden down and through, transpierced by the mounted regiment deployed there for the purpose of preventing anyone from escaping murder by their nine-foot-long, straight-grained, beechwood-shaft cavalry lances fitted with their new and improved 10-inch-long, saber-sharp, forged steel, diamond-shaped, grooved-and-whelked, rabbeted impaling heads
(advertised as killing “bigger, better, faster”) that when withdrawn from back or belly, neck or eye, chest or ribs or groin, come away custardy and creamed with human gore.
Pigsticking. It ends, this La Hora de la Verdad, this La Hora del Último Suspiro, this matador fantasy, as it must, predictably, in so much presumptive pigsticking.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,