This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  Make plain to them the excellence of killing

  And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

  —Stephen Crane, War is Kind

  Thirty, 40, at most 45 minutes later, it was all over, and Santa Anna was lounging in his tent, shrugging as he remarked to Almonte, “Todo en un día de trabajo. ¿Un asunto de pequeña, es cierto, pero una victoria es una victoria, no? Ahora, es hora de sacar la basura. Los quemamos, estos….descartes. Todas los doscientos cincuenta y siete. ¿Es doscientos cincuenta y siete, no? All in a day’s work. A small affair, granted, but a victory is a victory, no? Now, time to take out the garbage. We burn them, these…. discards. All 257. It is 257, isn’t it?”

  When the adjutant shrugged, palms up, Santa Anna continued, “No importa. No tiene importancia, el numero. Los muertos están muertos y se merecen estar muerto. No matter. It is of no importance, the number. The dead are dead and deserve to be dead.

  “From the beginning, this entire farce has been about nada but pirating the territory from us and delivering it to their American masters. To turn Tejas into Gringolandia while making a mockery of our laws and abusing the hospitality of our people, alta, baja, y mediana.

  “They are like the asps of fable. After we took them to our bosom, they betrayed us, turned on us. Had I not stopped them here, now, they would have destroyed us. ¿Qué otra cosa puedo tener, eh Almonte? What choice did I have, eh Almonte?”

  “Ninguno, mi General. Ellos te dieron ninguna. None General. They gave you none.”

  “Correcto. Eso es. Fue la voluntad de Dios. Ninguno se atreve mi culpa por hacer la voluntad de Dios. Right. That is right. It was God’s will. None dare blame me for doing God’s will.”

  The voice of flame shake wild voice from the grave….

  Bones roaring all the day long….

  I have put my trust in smoke….

  A dead man, perhaps, can sense an inferno, just as the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  The worst was over. But was it? Really? Was the worst really over? Or was it here. Right here. Right now.

  My limp, lifeless, 177 pound, five-foot-ten-inch corpse, its deadweight, was clutched at, dragged, hoisted, carried, tossed onto a tumbril (or, conceivably, oxcart) before being jounced along the ground in advance of being lifted and tossed yet again, this time onto an imbricated heap of big branches and board lumber, mesquite faggots and sawdust, the wooded weight of which, as it was stacked criss-cross upon my chest and pelvis in alternating cake-layers of corpses and cordwood, not only crushed and flattened, but kicked free a fragrance of acacia and creosote, pecan and peach and persimmon.

  Arrobas of kerosene were slung up, onto, across the heap in arcs elongated as country-miles in advance of the torches being lighted and touched to.

  Whuff!

  This was no humane or civilized business, reducing 257 human beings to carbon. It was hard, crude, clumsy work bereft of all ceremony, respect or reverence. And it smelled poorly. The stench of the frying human fats and greases, sebums, saps and silts, the lards, lipids, lees and lanolins, residual oils, resins, tars and turpentines, pitches and petroleums, the gravies, soups and dews that 257 barbecuing human carcasses make was intolerable. Nidorous. Not of this earth. The wind itself was helpless before it, left no alternative but to hold its own breath.

  Not literally, of course—I was dead, after all, I was cruciate—but the horizon appeared to me then as near at hand as it ever had, the sky as high as halos. I watched as fleshmelt, fire-hived, lifted unstitched from ossature. I listened to burst bone sift osteoblasted to cinder and soot, these crusts and tissues of heaven re-inscribing the remnants of battle ashen overhead in the chalked residues of war.

  My soul, if I had one—and I believe that I may have, I was, frankly, counting upon it—passed engulfed through charred wood, ascended winch-torqued through flame-churn, before hovering, hoisted arm’s length above its lick where, released, it for the briefest instant flitted, drifted, then….pranced, fireshookfree, head to foot. This choreography of that which once was deep within, become that which was leapt unleashed for its life out and upward, celestial as stardust.

  Get light enough, find yourself en-lightened enough, flammivomous, and—damn!—you could actually….levitate!

  And this felt fine. Felt right. To be done with it. Shed of its shadow. Risen. A-risen. Having ascended. Transcended. This life. Its pain. The beauty of pain. How impossible, such beauty! How lethal! This peace. At last. Sweet rest. Sweeter repose.

  Once—but a moment ago, wasn’t it? is that conceivable?—I was the Colonel in charge of this place, commanding officer of the outpost here. But now, now everyone was dead. My men to a man were dead, and I am little but rumor, embers windblown cold across a killing field while:

  ….terrified young men

  Quick on their feet

  Lob one another’s skulls across

  Wings of strange birds that are burning

  Themselves alive.

  And the outpost? The outpost I once commanded? The Alamo? The Alamo no longer matters. If it ever did. And it never did.

  Martyrs seldom merit the meaning of their martyrdom, and anyone, anyone at all—today, tomorrow, the next day or day after that—can and must and will gladly die for a cause, the one they in their confusion convince themselves is worth fighting for.

  In light of which, all that may matter is the morning still to come. And the one after that. And the one after that. Awakening. Emerging alive. Arising. From the dream.

  Or the nightmare.

  Ashes, all that faces up

  (ad astra)

  In the incendiary hush

  A language of soot silent as cilia

  Burns too bright to bear:

  And then the order was issued: ¡Enciendalos! ¡Fuego ellos!

  Light ’em up! Fire ’em up!

  ¡Enviarlos al infierno!

  Send them to hell!

  And the raptors, disturbed, rose in a flock

  As angry as a starving man

  Deprived of his last meal

  The sky has beaks

  There is no slop it will not eat

  Stoop to eat

  chewing sulfur, spewing ash

  (A human corpse requires five hours to combust and carbonize yielding ten pounds of coomb per carcass, its skull when it explodes uncannily resembling the blast of a Nock Volley Gun.)

  Sooner or later whatever is left always is lost

  Sooner or later nothing happens as it otherwise will

  Sooner or later that which once was may still be occurring

  Sooner or later a man is prey, quarry or prey:

  “O god, my god, can Time, now, ferry me the rest of the way?”

  All the trouble we go to

  All the chaos

  All the life

  to go on and on

  contained in the chaos

  we try to live

  being in trouble

  of the uncontainable moment

  in lieu of the inevitable

  Yesterday’s ashes suspended in the air

  Enjamb the spot (*) where a story once stopped

  Text torched, tuskless, teeth bared.

  * The only hope, or else despair

  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

  Travis is a liar.

  Travis is a goddamn liar.

  All his reports are lies and damned lies.

  There are no Mexican forces there in Bejar.

  It is only electioneering schemed by him to sustain his popularity; he grandstands, he always has been little but a grandstander.

  I do not believe that he is the author of all these so-called appeals. He is not capable of such writing. He hasn’t the words or the way with them. I believe they are false reports got up by the Mexicans to entice us out into the open in a faraway place where they might have their bloody way with us.

  —Texas Army Commander-in-C
hief, Major-General Sam Houston to W.W. Thompson at Burnham’s Crossing halfway between San Felipe and Gonzales March 8, 1836

  What was is not. Not any longer. A man appears in many places at once. Bobs a moment. Disappears beneath their waves. Many waves.

  Buffeted by the inscrutable surf of dates, historic dates, he loses all sense of time, of chronology and direction, of which was when and what once was, forgetting, if he ever knew, what he was supposed to remember about what incident or event or occasion corresponds to what year or whose name belongs to whose identity or where what happened is said to have occurred, fated never to know life save as the figment of a corrupt imagination.

  For his is a clock wound backward. Its hands rush in reverse and he is caught there, enmeshed in its gears, trapped in its flow, hanging on for dear death, reposed contra in time. The past never is over for him. The past is his present, that present his future, and the places are each the same place—shabby, soul-less, oceanically soul-less, shorn of all duende.

  A life always is made too little of—beached amidst the shallows, scuttled upon the shoals, brought up short of shore, incomplete and unfinished, fragmented, flindered, half-told. Bleached through to the broke white in the bone.

  Death wields the upper hand. Determines the story’s end. How it will end. Too soon.

  What it writes is written in blood: rest in peace, rest in memory, rest in meaning, rest in such lies as survive. Because soul is the sole witness, you see. Soul alone. Soul alone is the witness.

  There are no fairytales.

  Back in Alabama, the Ma, upon being informed that her first-born, her eldest son, is dead, betrays or feigns to betray no surprise or other inkling of discernible emotion beyond remarking matter-of-factly, “Well, I’ll wager they found no wounds in that boy’s back,” while the Pap, at best but half the man he once was owing to a left-hemispheric stroke suffered but the year before, musters little but a vacant, dysarthriatic stare out of which at some tortured length issues a gurged-up grotesquerie of sound, a wrenched, wretchedly garbled, arguably intelligible howl or wail that many of those present take for the word:

  “Who?”

  Donde esta el perro? That dread damn dead pariah dog, the one that hounds me so.

  I wonder. Am left to wonder. Been wondering lately. All these years later. Whether upon being shot, in that moment when the lightning spat up through the darkness from down below splitting my head apart, and I, reeling, glimpsed above me for a last lofty moment some ineluctable metallic brilliance and heard deep in my ears the crack of the thunderclaps even as I felt a sort of queer relief realizing that I had been shot and fell then against the cannon, across its caldera, that volcano, sliding slowly under it, sinking under thinking how dingy a way this was to die, I wonder whether as I lay there sensing the life slithering out of me like so much offal, like lava in the lack of last light looking red, blue, blue-black, wonder as I screamed and heard myself screaming and heard the echoes of my screaming return to me as they lifted out and across the courtyard in the dark caroming off the walls of the compound, that BURROW….

  I wonder, did somebody, anybody at all, after it was over, all over, last word, palabra ultima, did someone, some Good Samaritan perhaps, one possessed of the requisite duende, bother to throw a dead dog down after me?

  The only secret people keep, Is Immortality.

  &

  The only immortality, is absence.

  “There is a saying here,” he wrote in his diary mere hours before his murder, “what they call a refrane: ‘Hay más tiempo que vida.’ Which roughly means, ‘There is more time, than life.’

  “It is the nature of History to take its time, for only time can tell. It may well be, as another of their refranes goes, that ‘El embrague de la Historia no es sino un traba a la Vida,’ that ‘The clutch of History is but a fetter to Life,’ but come what may, I am content, as I must be, to wait upon the writing of its next, and final, stanza.

  “Time can be killed. Each of us has done our share of it. But it cannot be silenced. The poets will come. The poets will come because while there may be more time than life, there is more duende than time. In that, I repose both my confidence and my faith. In time, the poets will come to weave what they will of the SOUL of what they alone will find here:

  Sin lagrimas, profanidades, sin gritos de la crucifixion de, solo la notica del latido de nuestra sangre, solo los susurros de huesos.

  No tears, profanities, no cries of crucifixion,

  only the tidings of the beat of our blood,

  only the whispers of bones.

  Que se necesita para que los muertos descansan en paz?

  It is easy to lose Travis when the story grows larger, to forget the individual….easy to forget the unhappiness of his life….or the hope….But it was all there in him, for he was the sum of it…..the making of him….he remained to the end what he had become….

  —Archie P. McDonald, his biographer

  Citations

  p. 8, boldface: Jules Laforgue (“Albums”)

  p. 9, parenthetical in italics: Eleni Sikelianos (“At Night The Autoportrait”)

  p. 44, parenthetical in italics: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (“Texas”)

  p. 130, in italics: William Carlos Williams (“Kora in Hell”)

  p. 133, ff: The section, “February 23rd,” is glossed after Kafka.

  p. 133, in italics: Christian Bok (The Xenotext)

  p. 135, in italics: William Carlos Williams (“Kora in Hell”)

  p. 138, in italics: Lyn Hejinian (“The Distance”)

  p. 140, parenthetical in boldface: Clayton Eshleman (“Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D’Audoubert” and “Navel of the Moon”)

  p. 184, in italics: Roy Fuller (“Death”)

  p. 197: W.G. Sebald (“Austerlitz”), translated by Anthea Bell, translation copyright © 2001 by Anthea Bell. Excerpt used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  p. 198, 1st line in italics: William Carlos Williams (“Kora in Hell”)

  p. 198, 2nd line in italics: Anne Carson (“The Beauty of the Husband”)

  p. 203, boldface: Robert Creeley (“Heroes”)

  p. 204: Paul Muldoon (“Cows”)

  p. 205: Samuel Beckett (“The Unnamable”)

  p. 205: William Carlos Williams (“Rome”)

  p. 206: William Gass (“Life Sentences”)

  p. 207: Seamus Heaney (“Nobel Lecture”)

  p. 208, 1st parenthetical in italics: Lucie Brock-Broido (“Uncollected Poem”)

  p. 208, 2nd parenthetical in italics: Gilbert Sorrentino (“A Celebration of Sorts”)

  p. 218, lines in boldface italics: Ronald Johnson (“ARK: The Foundations”)

  p. 218, phrase in italics: T.S Eliot (Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”)

  p. 219, in italics: James Wright (“A Mad Fight Song”)

  p. 220: Didier Cahen (“Ashes, all that faces up”)

  p. 222, bottom of page: T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”)

  p. 226, 2nd-to-last line: Emily Dickinson (“Reticence”)

  p. 226, last line: Lyn Hejinian (“The Distance”)

  p. 228: Archie McDonald (William Barret Travis: A Biography)

  Acknowledgments

  While literature about the Texas Revolution and the Siege & Battle of the Alamo, as well as that inspired by such iconic figures as David Crockett, James Bowie, Sam Houston and Santa Anna, is so considerable as to constitute its own cottage industry, the inclusion here of a comprehensive bibliography of such works would be not only inappropriate, but needlessly onerous. The literature which encompasses the life entire of William Barret Travis is markedly less so.

  To my knowledge there exists but a single serious biography, Archie McDonald’s eponymously-titled, 200-plus page work published some 40 years ago, a scholarly effort that remained unsurpassed until William C. Davis published his monumental, meticulously documented, Three Roads to the Alamo (1998), a groundb
reaking “multiple” biography of 22 chapters, roughly a quarter of which are devoted to Travis. As for works of fiction, This Way Slaughter, for all its contraventions and transmutations of historical fact, is, so far as I have been able to determine, the first to conjure Travis as its protagonist.

  With respect to the Alamo itself, two works merit special mention. Mark Lemon’s impeccably researched, cinematically detailed, The Illustrated Alamo 1836: A Photographic Journey (2008), is an invaluable resource for those interested not only in appreciating what that place may once have looked like, but in contextualizing what it felt like; it is nothing less than a five-course meal for the mind’s eye. Floyd Collins’s stirring What Harvest: Poems on the Siege & Battle of the Alamo (2011), is unquestionably the most accomplished collection of poesy and prose poetry upon the subject.

  Absent the availability of the aforementioned works, it is conceivable that certain aspects of This Way Slaughter might have evolved somewhat differently.

  It perhaps merits remarking at this point that as an author who subscribes to the dictum that, all equal, writers of fiction must refrain from “explaining” their work, I am content, for better or worse, to permit the words as written upon the page to speak for themselves. That said, I am not insensitive to the oft-voiced confusion of certain readers with respect to the mongrelized nature of a work such as this—namely, a fiction that is inspired by, yet one that aims deliberately to transcend the strictly “historical.”

  It may help to state, then, that any and all augmentations, variations, violations, omissions and outright contradictions of historical “fact” are both strictly of my own devising and purposefully calculated. On those occasions where History and Aesthetics, Fact and Fabrication found themselves in competition or conflict, it typically was the former that found itself during the writing obliged to defer to the latter. In so many words, it was what was up the creative sleeve that received priority over what was pulled from the historical hat.