This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  Travis Diary, March 3, 1836:

  40 degrees. Crisp. Calm. Clear. The sun slapping down, its spank in slabs and planks. Bonham is back! (As Seguin is not. Yet.) At mid-morning, in broad daylight, Lt. James Butler Bonham galloped miraculously untouched through the dumbstruck enemy’s lines to deliver us word that there shall be no relief, no rescue, that Houston has commanded that we evacuate this place upon the instant, is apoplectic about our not having done so earlier. So then it is as I had feared. We are abandoned to manage our fate strictly upon our own. Well, if nothing else, we now know that we can cease hoping, praying, dreaming, and so set about the business of either bargaining for our lives, or selling them most dear. Bonham also deposited with me a single written communiqué that, while most welcome in one respect, is now bounden to have little practicable effect. It reads:

  My true friend, you cannot conceive of my anxiety. We have not the slightest news of your situation and are given over to a thousand conjectures and conjurings about you. We await another 300 here from all points and vow to lose no time in providing you assistance. For God’s sake, Buck, hold out until we can succor you. Best wishes to all your people there and tell them to hold on firmly by their WILLS until we arrive. P.S. Write us very soon.

  —R. M. Williamson, Cmdt. Ranging Companies Gonzales, DeWitt’s Colony

  God bless Willie. But now, it is time at last to write Rebecca. I must, but do dread doing so. What say, after all, and how in god’s name say it?

  Estamos tan jodidos.

  To Rebecca

  Mi Corazón, Mi Enamoré, Mi Virtuosa,

  It is late and I write in haste as the enemy encroaches on all sides here not 200 yards from where I sit writing at a loss to fill the page with all the poetry my soul contains.

  My belief in our cause, Bec, remains unshaken, though in the drab light of recent events I sometimes wonder whether I should not rue the day I came to Texas. And yet, had I not, I would not have met you, known you, loved you. Whatever may happen, know that I am possessed of no regret. I am possessed only of gratitude. I feel smiled upon. Graced. Graced and chosen. I feel impossibly blessed.

  I dream of you every night, have dreamt of you every night since coming here, large with the desire to return to you over all distances, past all divides, missing you unto extinction. But dreams, Bec, dreams are parlous things, parlous and delicate, as butterfly wings. Because they fade away, take fragile flight, in our pursuit of them as they alight, often as not, they are destroyed

  It is said that savage events, eventos salvajes, steer their own course, dictate their own career, predict their own outcome. Certainly they proceed according to their own grim logic, which is that of men, their virulence, that violence which seeks always to sustain at all cost a life of its own. The earth orbits, the world spins, bad men and good cycle through of their own accord upon their hungry rounds fed by the blood spilled in the name of a mortal meaning each seeks and seldom finds.

  Our war never ends. There are merely lulls and lapses, longuers and lassitudes.

  I do not know whether some things are worth dying for. Such certainty eludes me. I know only that some of us believe it is necessary to do that which is required of us, required by what we are, who we are, why we are, believe we are.

  I love you Rebecca, more than I knew possible or might have wished or hoped or dreamed. More, certainly, than I deserve. This love the size of the sky. Were life otherwise, were it possessed of a kernel of fairness, we would die enraptured. Die in one another’s arms. Die infinitely. Instead, whether we shall see one another again now appears doubtful, however much I should never be so happy as to be shed of this wretched place and returned whence I better, for love’s sake, belong. It is, for me, as once the Psalmist wrote, “My soul breaketh for longing of Thee.”

  What the devil am I doing here, Bec? Once, I knew. Or thought I did. I thought I was doing my duty. How foolish I was! How mistaken! Not to apprehend that my death was to be considered by certain people the admissible cost of pursuing their own ends. I daresay that I have had more than my fill of self-sacrifice. The charms of martyrdom hold no allure for me. I am badly used, and about that, I confess, I am furious. The fault may be mine, the blame belongs to others. May they choke on it.

  My god! All the ways a man, saint or sinner, martyr or marplot, can misspend his life. It is difficult, so goddamn difficult, to get anything right. Say it, write it, do it, right. It is hard to do anything worth its doing. Though perhaps it is never too late to learn about love, or how to die for it, however unsung, breathing in the last of its sun. That radiance. In beams.

  Perhaps, who knows, if we are fortunate beyond what we deserve, someday someone somewhere may remember that something happened here that may merit its well-remembering. Perhaps our ruin will to future times be as past days are to us. But there is no correcting it. Not now. It is too late. Too late, I fear, for everything.

  The fugue of history always is far-off until the moment it assails us. And then—may I chance a Latinism?—then contemptus mundi. No, should it come to it, I would much prefer not to be installed in a niche in History. Indeed, at the moment, I can imagine nothing that would distress me more.

  The regrettable truth, my love, is that should we fail to be massively relieved in the next day or two, I am resolved to do whatever I can, whatever may be necessary up to and including negotiating terms of our surrender, to avoid what otherwise must be a tragedy of unthinkable proportions.

  So then, do not hope. Rather, pray. Pray for us, Becca.

  What comprises a life well-lived? Is mine one? What finally does it amount to? Or perhaps amounting to misses the point. Still, what can be its purpose when it leads to the sacrifice of all that makes it worth its living? Blake says that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Blake was wise, but first one must survive.

  It, all this, can only be a love story, is it not so? That at last, and precisely that. A love story gone wrong. All wrong. Grotesquely wrong. Love of Tejas. Love of you. Love, too much perhaps, of Self. The story of what one does for love and what one does not. What one is willing to do and what one is not. What one finds oneself doing because it must be done.

  I would have much preferred not to live a skeleton’s life, but we seldom are permitted to choose which bones we pick, least of all with ourselves. Every man would be a paladin, a Galahad, every man a Lancelot, his own story’s hero. And yet, tempt fate as he may, storybook it away, no man wishes to die. But then, neither does he wish to fail to book passage upon the one ship, the voyage of which is possessed of the promise to endow his life with some scrap of higher meaning. Insofar as such meaning may exist.

  But does it?

  I am faced now with the inevitable eleventh-hour questions. Does the way one dies matter? Does choosing the time, place and manner of one’s death confer upon that death a measure of meaning or worth or value that it otherwise would not possess? Is there a distinction to be drawn between a “good” death and some other kind? And if there is, how draw it? Who draws it? And why?

  Perhaps these are the wrong questions. Perhaps the right ones, right one, the only one is, does love really become greater, better, truer, does it thrive best in the midst of calamity, as the world shuts down and time runs out? The heart softens, Bec, softens and swells—too late to stop now the wayward rainbow in my soul—even as the hide heals harder by half.

  Here I am staring death in the face, doing my best to spit squarely in its eye, and suddenly nothing could be clearer than that dead is dead. Just that. Only that. That alone. Mere, mundane, meh. Just so.

  Oh, I may try as I am able to console myself that my blood may water this land, marry with its soil, sift through, sink, soak in, settle here, stain deep its sands, become one with the flesh of this earth knowing that this is how and where my love will die, for the sake of something still unborn, stillborn. But I know better. I know better now. I know that I am bounden to lose my life, and soon, to what amounts to little more than a mindless b
lunder.

  I know the truth. I know that it is all so much fiction. The truth/is fiction.

  Out of sight, out of mind, out of luck, out of time. No help, no relief, no reinforcement, no rescue, no succor or salvation. Our being here is no exploit, no feat or emprise. It is an act of monumental miscalculation.

  Live, Becca, I bade you. Take pains to live at all cost. Live, then love better still, without tears or sorrow, fears or regret.

  Live without saudade. Love with duende.

  Thinking of you

  plunged plush in prayer

  Beneath this mesh of moon

  Lifted, lush, lunging long

  down the open eye of your throat

  Your loving, Will*

  *(Seven years after her fiance’s death at the Alamo, an uncommonly propertied Rebecca Cummings—she owned at the time over 8,000 acres, half-a-dozen slaves and 125 head of cattle—married a San Felipe-based attorney who had migrated from Claiborne, Alabama to Texas in 1838. David Young Portis, four years her senior, was to become a state senator, then a judge. The childless couple remained man and wife for 30 years until Rebecca’s death in 1874 in San Angelo, and her subsequent burial in San Antonio’s Odd Fellows Cemetery, roughly twelve blocks east of the spot where some three decades earlier William Barret Travis had lost his life.)

  To David Ayres, Montville:

  Please take care of my little boy. If the country be lost and I perish, he at least will have the knowledge that he is the son of a man who died fighting to win for him that country’s freedom. It is not much, but it is all I have to give.

  It is everything.*

  *(Following his father’s death, Charles Edward lived with both his Travis and Cato relatives back in Alabama, his mother and her second husband, Dr. Samuel Grandin Cloud, having died in the New Orleans yellow fever epidemic of 1848. Returning to Texas, he was in 1853 elected to and served a single term in the state legislature before a brief stint with the Texas Rangers led to his being commissioned a Captain of Cavalry in the U.S. Army, a rank he held for roughly a year before being court-martialed and cashiered for conduct unbecoming. Entering Baylor University Law School, he was admitted to the Texas Bar upon his graduation as a member of the class of 1859. A year later, at the age of 31, unmarried and childless, he died of consumption at Chappell Hill, Texas.)

  Travis Diary, March 4, 1836:

  44 degrees. Gusty raw. Savage dawn. Vile light. I have neither slept nor eaten in three days, find myself nodding off now and again only to jar awake with brute starts undreamed to half-life. All is pervigilium here; tension pours like tears pulsing wettened as wounds from every weeping wall. Every hour of every day it is three in the morning. Minutes feel like hours, hours days. Moments turtle agotado. Listless. I see the laxity in the mens’ eyes, the banjaxing, the hollowed, dead, fixed blank stare, staring at nothing, staring at the something miles off that is not there. Save holes. Holes in time and non-time. Hole after hole. They would dive deep inside them, plunge through and disappear. So many, too many, verge upon derangement now. Sapped and jangled, fevered and belly-sick, flavid about the gills, forfeit to the occasional raving hallucination. The greatest events in human history occur while we sleep. I cannot sleep. Nuit blanche after nuit blanche. Is there a point of no return? A breaking point? A rubicon moment when a limit is reached beyond which the enemy becomes oneself as much as any other? When the only conceivable escape is toward the one place one dare not go? So how much longer now? Tonight? Tomorrow? Sooner? Later? Instanter? Difficult to consider that the prospect at hand is less that we are soon to be no more, than that we continue stupidly to persist in our belief that we once were anything else. Between what is lurking out there, biding its lethal time, that which is on its way, oncoming and unstoppable, and that which is in here, mired unalterably in place, already gone or going, the choice is clear enough: there is no choice worth its choosing. No one sees time save in its monstrous passage across long walls. These crumbling, half-tumbled walls. This is how it ends in the face of those who would skin you alive clean to the bone, peel you back like the pulp of a plum, chin to shin, buttocks to brow. Where, god-left, god-shed, god-shunned as every jackal named Judas, the breeze bends like a branch, the sun siphons red to the rim of its rind, and the only certainty available, the only inevitability, is the unswerving punctuality of chance. Angel of mercy become angel of death. The descent of beasts, hellbound on all five sides.

  Out of the garden

  into the jaws,

  welcome home—Odium fati—

  to Golgotha.

  Morning, noon, eventide too

  the sky blood red

  blood black

  and blue.

  The Line

  I remember standing before the men, my men, this omnium gatherum in the churchyard, the chapelyard, bracketed by the high adobe wall of the Convento to the north, and the earthen-embedded timber pickets of the Empalizada to the south, vowing to myself to render what was about to happen as quick and painless as I might manage to make it.

  Behind me loomed the 90-year-old chapel, its native limestone, 25-foot-high Tuscan-style, quattro-columned, elaborately gadrooned and archwayed façade, owing to the enemy’s week-and-a-half of cannonade, now a much battered, ocher-and-isabelline-colored wreck. The four pedestaled figures of its wall-mounted plaster saints—Francis, Anthony, Bartholomew, Clare (or perhaps Dominic and Ferdinand; some dispute)—were pitted and pockmarked, spalled, spalted and grotesquely gouged. Anthony had lost the better part of his head, Clare been dashed to stumps below the knees.

  Here of late, I had been going out of my way to scant it, the chapel. There was about the place the whiff of sulfur, clack of knucklebones, the clanking of heavy chains. Still, I had selected this spot in preference to others because anything framed by an arch intrinsically is picturesque, and, while I harbored no expectation that this crowd in particular was like to appreciate how aesthetically apropos was the setting, for what I had in mind, no single quality was more fitting—and, I was hoping, effective.

  The air felt like sleet. My teeth buzzled like blo-flies as they often did when the air felt like sleet. Clearing my sleet-corroded throat, I tugged at the wheel-wide brim of my hat while my eyes dartled right to left, left to right and I paused to wonder whether this wasn’t the most difficult moment of my life in a life fraught with difficult moments.

  “Contrary to what you may have heard rumored with respect to the purpose of my gathering you here,” I began, “I wish at once to make clear that I am disinclined to scratch, sketch, or otherwise draw a line in the sand with my sword. Not only”—I clutched my coatflaps, batwinging them wide to either side—“am I not wearing one, but if I were, such a gesture—cheap stunt, actually—not only would be gratuitously theatrical, but place each of you in the unpardonably impossible position of having publicly to declare your intention to leave or stay, a decision, a choice, that clearly is yours to make strictly in private, a sacred matter between you and your God.”

  The wind, I knew, was scattering my words like jackstraw; I suspected that for all those to the rearmost could hear, I might as well have been speaking in tongues. That said, those 250 men—despite their cud-chomping jaws, chins juiced brown, the cheeks apple-bulged with chaw—were more attentive than I had anticipated. Or, perhaps, after enduring a fortnight deprived of a decent night’s shut-eye, they were asleep on their feet, dead to the world, a world that at present was arrayed hard against them in four directions as far as their eyes could see.

  When one of the men bellowed, “Louder!”, I squared my shoulders, tossing the sunbright colors of my zarape over my left, then hooked my thumbs into the accordion-pleated sateen of my waist sash. The wind was whippy; when it gusted, it backcurled the brim of my cream-colored Quaker crown hat like a scroll.