by Bruce Olds
So now Christ! my heart is punching beserk out my chest pumping black blood everywhere, churned pitch-hot surfing my skin, mad slick of spat grease.
Downthroat past a tongue slurred to paddling lava this plunge of scalded fist closing closing closing to a claw clenching frantic air seeking channels cinched by belts pinched rib-tight buckled against my breath, every lunglift a caber heave, flexed shoulders fanspread on fire their wing-rack of flesh charred cushion for a thousand drill pins.
Lampreys of pain.
Need to piss. Afraid to piss. Have to piss. Sharks’ teeth lick my leg lengths when Jesus! harpooned on a spit roasting inside out praying not to combust my cock flame of whale slush scorpioned at my feet.
The United States as we understand
Took sick and shat out the dregs of its land,
Her murderers, bankrupts, and knaves you may see
All middened as one in San Felipe.
Austin
I recall arriving in San Felipe saddle-sore and trail-talc’d fourth week in May, first week in June, by which time I had lost all track of time, though those there who claimed to be its keepers struck me as scarcely the last word upon the subject. (I can say now that the trip was nothing to speak of save for that single, singular Natchez Under-the-Hill night during which I had gambled and won and lost most of what I had won, though not gone so bust that I did not have enough left over to rent a woman for a slick hour—Creole as it turned out, or so she boasted—before I had again to be on my way. I can highly recommend Natchez in that respect. As such women go, the Natchez sort are both surprisingly affordable and commendably professional. Not artists, perhaps, but certainly compliant enough artisans of a certain energetic competence. They also are uncommonly clean.)
San Felipe, it turned out, wasn’t much. But then, I wasn’t expecting much. I had no expectations, nor proper claim upon them. At that time, I rough-reckon 500 people were domiciled thereabouts in four or five dozen log cabins as well as various lean-tos, dugouts, shebangs, shanty half-sheds and shacks, even a few canvasback tents strewn stercoricolously to either side of the single hogbacked road—the Atascosito, as I was shortly to learn—that slanted through the gridless, purposely unpatterned town. To each side of the road, troughs slickened green and ruckled with the ooze of human waste and animal refuse belched vapors foul enough to clutch the place in a frothing ripeness so assaultive it burned to breathe too deeply.
There appeared to be but a single hotel (The Pilgrim’s Whiteside Rest or Roost), a single pair of taverns (The Last Shot and Marty’s Last Chance Beehive), a few general stores, a schoolhouse, a smithy and wheelwright, post office, land office, and a printer’s shop (home, according to the sign propped in the window, to either the Texas Gazette or the Mexican Citizen). But, curiously, not a single church. A stab had been made at what I took for a central plaza, but the Greek nymph cupid-and-cherubim-less fountain at its hub was but half-built, and that half half-bygone.
I was told upon inquiring that Austin lived “out northskirt way on Bullinger’s Creek,” so I decided to ignore as best I might the growlings of my voluable belly in favor of pushing straight on for the Empresario’s homeplace—trailed at a wary watchful distance by a solitary, mange-ridden pariah dog of vulpine cast and lupine gait. Branching then banking then bisecting a bulge then a rise then a gap then a downslope through a stand of loblolly pine I remember off-angling toward a house I apprized through the trees as a single-story, double-wing, patchily-whitewashed, hewn-log structure technically known, I had cause to know, as a double-pen cedar plank dogtrot.
Nestled in an elaborately trenched, intricately foxholed fold of hedgerowed horseshoe glen back off a brushy creekbank, I was taken well aback to note that the structure was policed by a single four-pounder cannon perched upon a picket-rung platform nearby its entryway, as well as what I took for a pair of scaffold watch or signal towers upthrust to either flank a good 15 feet in the air. It was a layout, I recall remarking to myself at the time, not at all unconducive to defensive perimetering at a moment’s spurred notice.
Austin, I quickly discovered, was home, but drastically off his feed. Or so he confided shortly after welcoming me inside his “not unhumble abode.”
As we talk, I surmise that he not only is uncommonly engrossed in and by the state of his own health—apparently hypochrondriacal by nature, he enumerates insomnia, absence of appetite, “tourniquet” headache, “ill-fitted” tooth pain, ague fever and “heart complaint” among his more chronic maladies, as he does a “disposition” to grippe and rheumatism in the winter, “an agony of unlimbering come spring”—but that he is as melancholic a soul as I ever have encountered, something he attributes to having only recently lost his younger brother Brown, “upon whom I much-relied and to whom I was extraordinarily close.”
Whatever the cause, he radiates an aura of world-weariness, untold burden, exaggerated gravity, even gloom, a hangdog gloom as enveloping as a fogbank, thicker than some glue. Thirty-seven years old, with his slatted sides, stooped shoulders, receding hairline and puttied pallor, he seems a fair decade older. Were he to smile, such the impression, his whiskerless face must only fissure to fractions. Laugh, and it would fall piecemeal apart. Sober, this Austin, though less as a judge, so he strikes me, than an undertaker, one clad in the drab, loamish brown and black earth tones of his frockwear as for the lackluster grave.
“You know, Mr. Travis,” he says of a sudden crick-cracking his knuckles, “I am possessed of a most singular aversion to the phenomenal. And yet it dogs me sir. Hounds me day and night.”
I remember being at a loss as how appropriately to respond. The phenomenal? I do not respond.
“Sins of the father,” he says, “is it not so?”
Is it? I have no idea. “Well,” I say, needing, I feel, to say something, “my own once sired a bastard son. Taliaferro. To his credit, did right by him, pa did, took him into our home, schooled him, so on. Ma’s permission of course. Tally, he was reared no differently nor suffered unduly.”
This, it would seem, falls upon deaf ears. For all that my reply appears to register with him, I might better have kept silent.
“My father’s name, as you may know Mr. Travis, was Moses. Fine name, I suppose, though I venture he took it too seriously. It was his idea, you know, all this Texas business. I never wanted any part of it. But then he up and died, his dying wish being that I carry on in his stead. So,” he outspreads his arms and glances wide about, “here I am having in the meanwhile fallen hopelessly in love with that which I curse as often as not.”
I recall distinctly that our parley did not last long, an hour at most, if time enough to learn that he lives alone, has never married, is outspokenly, even maniacally anti-religionist, fluent in Spanish and consistently formal and decorous, if neither officious nor punctilious in deportment and manner. At one point inviting me, “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Travis, as much as you are comfortable telling,” I do so, pleading that there is not much to tell, save that which needs remain untellable.
“Ah, yes, of course,” he says, slowly nodding his head. “The past is past. Wipe clean the slate. Tabula rasa. Fresh start. You will find many here, most perhaps, who are cut from quite the selfsame cloth.”
Between sniffles he informs me that he is at present deeply involved in actively lobbying for repeal of Mexico’s recently enacted Anti-immigration Law which he considers, “beyond injudiciously detrimental to what we are endeavoring conscientiously to accomplish here, an act of the sheerest folly,” although he allows that, “as we Texians presently outnumber our Tejano counterparts some eight to one, a disparity that grows only more disproportionate by the day, it is perhaps understandable that the government in Mexico City should, going forward, wish more assiduously to monitor its frontera norte. The demographics are all on our side.”
After having me sign the “certificate of admittance”—mine is No. 588—that officially registers me as a “colonist, bachelor,” entitled to legal claim on
the standard quarter-league land grant of 1,107 acres, “the location of which with certain exemptions is entirely up to you,” he admonishes me to learn, “with due diligence and expedition,” both the local law and native language, before adding, “and if you must prioritize the two, Mr. Travis, you will do well to choose the latter. Learn Español, son, for in this country, este país, you will go no further than it will carry you. El idioma es la clave.”
Snuffling, the Empresario dabs some at his coryza, then licks his bowstrung lips across which no smile is permitted to flicker. Everything he says, each po-faced, deadpan word, at a minimum every other word, is wrenched from a mouth downdragged at its commissures beneath a pair of Abyssinian brown eyes drenched in rheum; when he tilts his head and the light catches them at a certain glancing angle, they appear almost…aubergine.
When I ask after the prospects of setting up a law practice, he is quick to recommend a spot called Anahuac—he pronounces it “anna-whack”—a town apparently some 100 miles due east on Galveston Bay that apparently serves as Texas’s official port of territorial entry. There, he suggests, where the government in Mexico City has established a customs house and garrisoned a monitoring fortress, “a man of your certain talents and obvious ambitions is, as I am given to know, not only much needed to represent the interests of the Texian citizenry there, but would have the field, as I understand it, the legal field I mean, much to himself.”
Massaging his temples with calipered fore and middle fingers, he cants his head then squinches his eyes the while palping first clockwise, then counterclockwise, first left, then right, before pressing the heel of a hand to a hinge of jaw, and wincing. “We are not yet splendid, Mr. Travis. As you can only have noticed, we are not yet resplendent here. But neither are we as abject as we may appear. We are on the rise, sir. Fear not. We are rising. And should you be of a mind to rise with us, then Anahuac…” Leaving off mid-thought, he pauses, cocks a brow. “Your indulgence sir, but—I hesitate to ask, is that … scent?”
I remember smiling at this. “Well, intoxicant, intended to be. Lavender and…”
“Bergamot!” he exclaims.
It is at that moment that I decide to like Austin. He lacks a certain vitality, true. Suffers from both an excess of austerity and paucity of charisma. Is perhaps too susceptible to self-pity and complaint. But while he is neither the warmest nor backslappingest man in the world, he more than compensates for the deficiency with a commendable lot of gentlemanly couth. And hygiene. Despite his hypochondria, perhaps on account of it, he is hygienic. A man who is himself hygienic can detect that in another man. And to discover it out here in the rough-and-ready, wild-and-woolly, middle of no-damn-where, how not respond favorably?
Sensing that I am overstaying my welcome, I am about to take my leave when he favors me with “the speech,” the same he has over the past decade made, I assume, hundreds of times:
“Mexico, Mr. Travis, as you will discover soon enough, and forget only at your peril, is decidedly not America. Here, men are not created equal. Here, they are granted no god-given or inalienable rights. Here, they may pursue their happiness, but only up to a point as determined by the government. Here, they may worship god, but only as the state ordains. Here, there is no writ of habeas corpus or trial by jury. For that matter, there is scant local autonomy of any sort, and the doctrine of personal property is but a matter of public expedience. La Autoridad, the Mexican Authority, can be manipulated to your advantage, but only within discrete limits, and even then that manipulation must remain as often as not a matter of silence, subtlety and slyboots.
“Understand, son, that this is a country yet in its infancy, one yet to grow up and hair over. It is a country whose constitution is barely seven years old. A country that achieved its independence from its motherland a scant 10 years past. A country that still is to discover what it is, what it stands for, what it wants for itself, has yet to establish an identity of its own, and that these facts taken together render it oft-times too feral of flesh and raw of nerve, fearful and uncertain, oversensitive and prone to irrationally taking offense and sensing hazard at every hand.
“We all are possessed of our private aspirations. What part yours may have played in your decision to come to Texas, I do not know. Nor do I need to know. What I do know is that whatever they are, they are unlikely to be realized in just the way you might have imagined, or”—grimacing, he clutches at his chest—“may be imagining still. Not that they must be disappointed, only that”—jaw-clench, chin-jut—“Texas has a way of, how put it, revising, if not dismantling them altogether.
“This is not to discourage you, nor ought you be discouraged. For those like yourself, young, ambitious, sound of body and mind, nimble of resource and wit, the opportunities here are boundless”—lip-gnaw, neck rub, shoulder roll, &c—“so long as you are prepared to maneuver within the rules of your new reality, rules that in time you will learn can be bent, if less often broken to your benefit.
“And so, Buck, here is my most earnest counsel, and you ought feel free to dispose of it as you may see fit. All that you may assume you know, all that you may believe you understand, all that you are convinced your experience has taught you, everything you have been and are at this moment, is from this moment en peligro, at hazard, subject to a re-becoming, a reinvention that, however unnatural or contrary you may find it, is for now beyond your capacity to conceive.
“You will discover, son, that the signs of unfriendliness, if not outright hostility, are everywhere. Be observant, discreet, tactful, vigilant, learn in silence to read them, and only then respond. Appropriately. Accommodatingly. Find it in yourself to do that, and I am confident that you not only will prosper, but discover in Tejas your destiny, whatever that may prove to be.”
These, I recall thinking at the time, are well-considered words, words that I intend as I may find myself able to avail myself of them, to heed by heart and soul and mind. In light of which, I know too well, I will in the event be needing to place a tether upon my temper. I will needmost to bank my fire, the one that flares and flames of its own accord more often than even I might prefer.
“Y ahora, buena suerte, Señor Travis. Buena suerte y vaya con Dios.”
Penny. Pound. It’s all in for Anahuac.
“Giddap!”
A Belated Prolegomenon
The chronological truth of one version of the story, which is to say the mischgedicht, warts-and-all one that we soon shall be about excavating here, had its genesis with the Louisiana Purchase circa 1803. This being, it merits mention, half-a-dozen years prior to William Barret Travis’s birth.
Under the terms of that legally dubious, 15 million dollar transaction with France, then-President Jefferson understood the territorial rights of the United States to extend to the Rio Grande, while Spain, then Mexico’s colonial mistress, contested such a (mis?)understanding, contending that those rights extended no further than the Calcasieu River in present-day Louisiana.
For the next 15 years, the territory between the Calcasieu (the “Arroyo Hondo” to the Spanish) and on westward to the Rio Grande—essentially present-day Texas, then little more than a desolate frontier inhabited by marauding bands of Indians (so remote and precarious is this frontera norte that native Mexicans refer to it as el lugar más alla del mundo, “the place beyond the world”)—remained between the two countries the source of ongoing dispute, intermittent friction, and, on occasion, open conflict, outright conflict distinguished by a series of so-called filibustering expeditions (from the Spanish filibustero, meaning “freebooter”). These unsanctioned paramilitary forays launched from American soil were aimed expressly at wresting Tejas from its Spanish/Mexican owners in order to establish it, in time, as an independent, slave-holding, rogue republic.
The bloodiest of these forays, popularly known as the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition, occurred as early as 1813 when a force of some 1,400 republican filibusters, covertly supported by the U.S. State Department, was routed at the Ba
ttle of Medina just south of the town of San Antonio de Bejar by a Spanish Royalist army commanded by one General Joaquín de Arredondo.
Prominent among the General’s officer corps was his protégé, an 18-year-old lieutenant named Antonio de Papua Maria Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez Lebron, who subsequently participated in the mass hanging of 800 of these bootstrap filibusters, as well as a Tejas-wide pogrom of rape, torture and beheadings carried out against their putative civilian supporters. Brute and brutal times.
While American citizens had begun “squatting” in significant numbers on Tejas land as early as 1815, it would not be until 1819, under the terms of the Adams-Onis (or Transcontinental) Treaty, that Spain and the United States mutually agreed to fix the international boundary at the Sabine River, the latter nation, in effect, relinquishing its claim to the disputed territory. Instead of settling the matter, however, the treaty only exacerbated it. Indeed it was that very summer that yet another filibustering foray was undertaken, this time numbering some 300 men, among them a 23-year-old, Kentucky-born Louisianian named James Bowie.
Throughout the decade to follow, especially after Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and eight years later constitutionally outlawed slavery, the U.S. government made repeated, if uniformly unsuccessful attempts to purchase the territory it had once considered its own and unabashedly continued to covet.
Mexico, meanwhile, frustrated in its efforts to encourage settlement and economic development of its vast (270,000 square mile), if equally inhospitable despoblado (depopulated zone), and powerless to stem the burgeoning flow of American emigration, endeavored to control and contain it by authorizing certain “reputable” individuals called empresarios—the first and most prominent of whom was Stephen Fuller Austin—to “siembre la tierra,” seed the ground by establishing the immigrants in so-called colonies subject to Mexican law. (Austin’s alone comprised some 15,000 square miles.)