This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  Santa Anna

  As is his wont on the eve of battle, Santa Anna, a.k.a. He Who Can Do Anything He Wants, is catnapping, so when Almonte jostles him awake by placing his hand upon, then gently squeezing his shoulder—which being the site of an old wound is as sensitive as a weathervane—El General makes little effort to disguise his annoyance.

  “Owww, goddamn it! ¿Qué demonios es esto, eh Almonte? ¿Por qué perturbas mis sueños? What the hell is this? Why do you trouble my dreams?”

  “Lo siento, mi General, pero we are just now in receipt of a communiqué from the traitor Travis.”

  The illegitimate son of a parish priest, the 32-year-old, U.S.-educated Almonte is an erstwhile Mexican newspaper editor who has known Santa Anna for more than a decade. For the past two weeks they have shared a single-story, limestone house (lent gratis for the purpose by its owner, Manuel Yturri y Castillo) tucked neatly into the northwest corner of Bejar’s Plaza de Islas in the middle of town.

  “Por qué?” says the Napoleon of the West flinging aside with a theatrical swish a silk sheet the color of new butter to reveal a brocaded, below-the-knee nightshirt the color of mint jelly. (His kincob one, to which he decidedly is more partial, is being laundered.) Swiveling on his non-extant butt, he swings his deeply scarred legs over the side of the bed in advance of placing his silk-stockinged feet, size 7 ¼, flat upon the terra cotta floor.

  The room smells diffidently of having lately been fumigated with an incense of white copal (copaifera officinalis), a distinctive scent featuring subtle hints of rainforest woodiness, sunbright citrus, and a spicy, creamy balsamic less peaty than peppery. Reputed to cleanse the spirit, clear the mind, calm anxiety, stimulate creativity and awaken the deepest stratas of the soul, the fragrance is one that Almonte finds singularly cloying.

  “Excellency?”

  “I said why. Why Almonte? Why would you believe that anything a creature of that sort, un bandido, una pirata, un forajido, un vagamundo, might have to say would interest me in the slightest?”

  “Ordinarily, mi General, nothing would lead me to believe una cosa tan ridícula, such a ridiculous thing. However, en este caso, in this instance, might I respectfully suggest that you….”

  Sensing impudence, or mockery, Santa Anna barks, “No, Almonte! I will not waste my time, mi tiempo, which you of all people know is precious, más preciosa, upon such, such….. pointlessness! I have no wish to read it, not a word!

  “We muster at midnight, attack before dawn. They lose, we win. They die, we live. Nothing can change that now, least of all some meaningless palabras penned by some bandito Yanqui who magnanimously was handed the opportunity to surrender to us—how many days has it been now?”

  “Doce, mi General.”

  “Twelve! Twelve days past! And who not only refused to do so, but answered us—¡piense en ello! think of it!—with the consputation of a cannon shot. I am not a merciless man, Almonte, as you of all people are aware, but my compassion, mi compasion, has its certain limits. Dare exceed them, as this Travers creature has so dared, and as you likewise are aware, there must follow certain consequences, cierto consecuencias.”

  “I understand, Excellency. Por supuesto. Of course. As you wish. But if I might take a moment, con su permiso, to read just the most pertinent passage….”

  “Pertinent? Really? Pertinent, Almonte? Surely you can only mean impertinent.”

  “Ha! Si. Por supuesto, mi General. Impertinent. Esta bien. Very good.”

  There ensues a pause, one that does not so much linger as dangle in mid-air, during which Santa Anna looks expectantly at Almonte, and Almonte looks wonderingly at Santa Anna.

  “So?”

  “Excellency?”

  “So, continue.” A hand waved in impatience. “Proceed. Read your impertinent passage.”

  Almonte suppresses his smile. “As you wish.” He reads. Finishes reading. Lowers the paper to his side having finished reading. The President of Mexico, he notices, is seated on the lip of the bed, eyes closed, evidently bored to unshed tears. “They offer to surrender to us. How do you wish to respond?”

  When Santa Anna at some length slowly opens his eyes—they strike Almonte as they often have struck him, dark as suns, bright as shadows—what he sees there is something he has seen many times before. Less incredulity than disgust, less disgust than contempt, less contempt than unmitigated aggression, they glower with it.

  “I do not,” he says. “I do not wish to respond. I will not respond. There shall be no response.”

  “Very well, my General, pero, Excellency, such a courtesy, una cortesía, that is to say, protocol requires….”

  Rising to his feet, Santa Anna shuffles to the window that opens onto La Plaza and its 100-year-old Cathedral of San Fernando, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria y Guadalupe. Save for a clutch of hobbled horses and a handful of low cook fires over which some few of his personal escolta, his presidential guard, La Guardia Dorados, can be barely delineated roasting ears of field corn, the plaza, redolent of horse dung and habanero, appears deserted. Following a moment of purposefully active silence, he invites Almonte to join him.

  “There,” he says pointing to the church. “What do you see Almonte? What do you see flying from the bell tower, just there?”

  “I cannot see anything, mi General. La oscuridad. The darkness. It is too dark to see.”

  “¿En serio? Really? Then permit me to tell you what I see. I see a flag. A red flag. Una bandera roja. A red silk flag signifying no quarter, no mercy, no prisoners. A blood-red flag announcing that every one of the enemy, every last one, cada último, shall be put to the sword. That is my response, Señor. That is the only response such chacales, such roedores, such gusanos, such jackals and vermin and worms deserve, and I expect that response to be delivered this very morning at the point of sword, of saber, of lance and of bayonet, that estos escorpiones, these scorpions may not be permitted to grow! ¿Claro? ¿Soy entendido? Am I understood?”

  “Perfectamente, mi General.”

  A gleam or gleaming enters Santa Anna’s eye or eyes.

  “I leave you with this, Almonte, and it is the last that I shall say upon the subject until victory is ours. If a man aspire to greatness, he needs, as the occasion may arise, to hold himself aloof enough from his own life to be capable of behavior that lesser men may judge not only morally reprehensible, but a sin against both God and nature.

  “Let History record what I did here, not what our enemy said here. It is the actions of men, not their words, not their sentiments, not their sentences, their sentences least of all, that matter.”

  Can’t say it better myself, and so will not try.

  It would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form recording who had perished….and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was like…. with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, “The fortunes of battle swayed this way and that,” or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us….Our concern with history….is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

  —W.G. Sebald

  So the truth lay elsewhere, did it? Ah yes, now I remember, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered, or, perhaps, but recently discovered in some inconceivably complex form squirreled deep inside a steamer trunk—or was it a wine cask or butter churn or cider press or the leaves of a bible—stored in the loft of a log house—or was it a cowshed or corncrib or dovecot—raised originally by “B
lack” Adam Zumwalt in the Lavaca River region some 100 miles east of Bejar. The same, so some later would swear, whence Wee Jock Warnell—23 years old, five foot tall in his bootheels, 110 pounds soaked through, the sole Texian defender to have survived the massacre—had managed miraculously to escape. And where, despite what three months later would prove his mortal head wound, he strove in his few lucid, if trauma-confabulated moments, less to recount or chronicle, than to convey in some inconceivably complex form his idiosyncratic, if semi-coherent, not entirely indecipherable sense of the horror he personally had experienced:

  To the Burrow’s walls in the dark across difficult terrain race men clad in many colors going that extra mile because:

  CHRIST’S BLOOD AND HEART ARE HERE….

  splashes of red chaos

  out of a jungle

  “driven to the wall you’d put claws to your toes and make a ladder”

  “Against this Wall, the way Brothers tear at/one another’s Heads”

  I

  In the chapel the incoming oncome having clambered,

  climbed, scaled

  the permeable membrane

  landsliding through the funnel of the ornamental gateway (no campanulate)

  where men and guns/with guns

  rally to the entablatured escarpments to enact the

  pro forma tragedy until

  O! O no!

  The Colonel! The Colonel is down!

  Watch how he dies now, our Colonel, young Colonel,

  how the brave young Travis dies

  “DUENDE” (he whispers)

  II

  all that currently is the current case =

  Outcome of the Historical Dynamic

  unfortified by war, namely:

  heads on pikes

  hides on frames

  eyes on skewers

  hearts on hooks

  peckers on racks

  the going price of any orthodoxy

  ramified by what’s at stake arcing along

  untrackable trajectories far afield

  per the PHYSICAL problem in kinetic principle

  III

  A cathedral

  armor-cladded (fragmentary construction decorated/desecrated for Christ)

  90 years ago arose impaled upon a bayonet of faith

  a mission imparting muffled messages to its natives: salvation

  sin

  survival

  self-im-mo-lation

  throughout this dead earth —SHADOWLANDIA—

  upon its sterile ground previously dormant

  recently roused

  fluctuating through

  penances & absolutions & the many fine madnesses

  of prayer

  IV

  before the military charged in

  (the Flying Company; la Compania de Vuelo)

  the priests were chased out chanting war songs remote in time

  Jesus was surrounded then by soldiers their lust their guns their dice their mezcal sacramental wine drunk warm as warm rain, smoother than silence

  stonemason walls howling with coarse laughter whilst Christ’s blood dangled from the ceiling and by torchlight unparalleled violence ensued selectively indiscriminate

  the next scene is:

  V

  hipwading endlessly through red mist red mist red mist muttering, evolve or revolt: “Are other choices

  soon to be made available?”

  the edifice over-stormed, battered to mineral the sudden

  falls

  of adobe walls

  whilst tapestries are slashed/

  crosses knocked slaunchways/

  stained glass shattered/

  censers and thuribles sent clattering/

  altars and installations, retablos y laminas

  overturned and strewn/

  vestments violated (stained scarlet & torn)

  ejecting colonists by hand-force without possibility of egress

  expulsionists and eradicators killing with abandon

  without expression

  while I hipwade endlessly through redmist watching:

  Bowie die brainsplattered upon his cot

  Bonham fall disemboweled across chapel-high walls

  Crockett? whereabouts unknown (evermore)

  culminating (inevitably, predictably) in

  trundled corpses bundled on tumbrils

  stacked ripe to the rafters white-powder memory

  exploding sky-high

  denting the sky

  (because the sky’s/the limit)

  with the ashen floes of their souls

  VI

  the dead dashed

  bashed in trampled on crumpled sapless and shrunken grown ancient while

  hacking their way, calvarium-free to God

  toward (waiting) oblivion, obliteration

  and the gallows (waiting)

  uncosmic, chaosmic

  beyond

  Death always is on time. Indeed,

  In all those stories the hero

  is beyond himself into the next thing….

  going into death.

  One moment I was striding to and fro atop a wall—not just any wall, the North Wall—still half-asleep beneath a suffering saffron sky. The next I was shot in the head, skull shattering above the brow, musketball a blowdart through my brain as I lurched grotesquely, a window-stunned bird, in advance of pitching slack-jawed to my knees, slowly dying, dying slowly, if with a startling paucity of bloodfuss.

  The good news is that I do not know I am dying because, being brainshot, I am cognitively incapable of accessing such knowledge.

  The bad news is that I am dying anyway.

  Typically, the last thing “the young” think about is death, but death was everywhere that day. It was unavoidable. I saw it. It stared me, teeth-bared, in the face. Even in the dark, I could not take my eyes off it.

  On the other hand, death, being death, could have cared less whether I or anyone else was thinking about it. When death comes, it comes as it will, as it wishes, regardless. When death arrives, it does so indifferently, warranted or otherwise, with or without permission.

  Death is possessed of its own momentum, as, too, its own valence and volition, as also its own endless ennui. No stopping it. No slowing it up. No deflecting or negotiating. No deals to be arranged, bargains struck, petitions or eleventh-hour appeals. Young, old, fair, middlin’, death neither discriminates nor recognizes distinctions. It does not need to, and wouldn’t, one suspects, in any case. Death, the ubiquitous leveler, always wields the upper hand, and what that hand wields, is weaponized.

  Death is not interested in knowing your name. William Barret Travis meant nothing to it. It is not that discerning. It does not concern itself with your strength of heart, or staunchness of nerve, or eloquence of ink-dipped quill.

  That day Death unlaced the sutures of history and fed ravening upon its wounds. It existed only to ensure that life wrecked itself, and if you happened to be William Barret Travis, and you found yourself where you found yourself, that time, that place, it wrecked it not a moment too soon.

  ON A WALL, A WONDERMENT

  And “now let us talk of slaughter and the slain.” Let us talk now about what happens when the end, the endless end, keeps ending over and over again. Because I was wondering. Is it true that you lingered there lockjawed and lobotomized, knocked pivot-wise blind as braille, tottering about like a Hottentot, your shellshot cabeza leaking memory of all you once were, no longer are, never will be again?

  Let us talk about how no crusade crusades absent its cost. How zealotry is pricey, pays poorly for the forfeiture made, the body count, KIA’s. How a second behind or a second ahead, turn right instead of left, and all of history implodes.

  Let us talk about how anyone, yourself for instance, can valorize himself out of existence, sacrifice all in the name of what’s right. How any dolt can die in his prime facing the music of El Deguello. Because being brave never bought a brave man a moment more o
r less. Because courage? That kind of courage comes carapaced in coffins.