One to Count Cadence (15 page)

As to the sons — by 1640 Johann led his own mercenary army of three hundred well-trained, hand-picked men. They were provisioned and not allowed to forage or pillage on friendly lands. They were well paid and, unlike other mercenary troops such as the German lansquenet, uniformed for war instead of show: a tunic with a stiff, thick leather breastplate, boots of waterproof Russian leather, a tight fitting, unadorned helmet. The three hundred were cavalry unlike any other contemporary horsemen: they fought on the ground as often as on horse. In Spain the three hundred held the line against a thousand Spanish, beat them off three times, then attacked and chased them until dark. But the best aspect of the Slagsted of Krummel army was its reliability; contracts were signed for durations instead of months which meant that they wouldn’t change sides in the middle of a battle, anyway.

This paid army, because of its compact size, survived the change from mercenary to national armies, and during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century fought and served as personal guards for every political organization which could afford them. Descendants of Jacob Slagsted controlled the army, maintained its size at three hundred, kept up the family literacy outside military academies, married fine horses of women, and by 1776 had spilled, in love and war, the bloods of Europe: Irish, Dutch, Polish, Magyar, Finn, Swede, Jewish, Alsatian, Prussian, and Greek, at least. But in 1781 the Slagsted-Krummel’s, as they were known, came to the New World, and like all who came to America, lost everything in the coming.

They arrived in Boston only to discover the war was over. The ship with the men and arms was impounded by the authorites and guarded by a warship, a refitted cutter which had seen no duty. The brothers in charge, Johann and Otto, were obviously gentlemen because of the size of their bribes and were let ashore. Johann rode to Philadelphia to get the release order, and Otto gambled and drank away all the money in the waterfront pubs of Boston. When Johann returned with a release order, two slick colonialists had another for him, impounding his men as bond servants to fulfill Otto’s debts. Johann traded his horse for the family chest, signed the papers, then he and Otto rode south on one horse, knowing, I suppose, what was going to happen. When the colonialists tried to collect their servants, the men — still armed because no one had the nerve to try to disarm them — killed the Americans, blew the cutter to hell, stole the ship, and sailed away into an untraceable sea, perhaps slipping ashore later to add themselves to the great number of scoundrels and cutthroats already in America. Otto managed a commission in the Virginia militia, but Johann, tired of Otto and armies, rode on south and west.

The Slagsted-Krummels were in a bad way by 1830, down to a single male survivor, one Joseph, who had a small ranch in South Texas along the Nueces River. He had come as a young man with a group of Irish settlers led by John Mullen, but left the settlement, San Patricio, to live some ten miles up the river, alone with Bible, bottle, and gun. He was able to trade with occasional roving bands of Lipan-Apaches because they thought he was crazy (primitives have always thought that madmen know too much truth to be killed). Joseph rejoined the Irish long enough during the Texas Revolution to attack Fort Lipantitlan — which guarded a ford on the Nueces — with Irish volunteers under Captain Ira Westover in 1835. In ‘42 he fought with the 192 men under General James Dix who defended the earthen fort aganst nearly a thousand Mexicans under General Antonio Canales, and successfully defended it. (It was a sort of reverse Alamo, except the drunks won this one.) Joseph lost an ear during the fighting and, the Irish of San Patriccio said, the rest of his senses.

He returned to his cabin to live alone, un-visited, mainly because he shot at potential visitors for no apparent reason, until the day he came across a Comanche buck slaughtering one of his cows. The buck was short and stocky like all Comanches, and as he leaned his long body over the steer, Joseph shot him high behind the shoulder as he would a deer. As he took the scalp (a man living alone needed all the good medicine he could get), the buck’s squaw ran out of a gully, waving a skinning knife. Joseph knocked her down with his rifle butt, then finished with the buck. Turning to the squaw, he noticed that she had fallen forward over a mesquite log and her buckskin skirt had ripped and her butt was showing. It was brown, dirty, large, but it was an ass, and Joseph, as I said, lived alone. (Like the scalp, he took what he could get.) He mounted in the quickest, most obvious way.

When Face-like-Horse awoke, a sputtering, one-eared wild man at her like a stallion, his teeth sliding off her greasy neck, she naturally assumed that the spirit of her man had entered the white man. No white-eye knew the secrets of Comanche love — and after battle, too, because before it, it steals the strength of a warrior. When the meeting was over, Face-like-Horse returned to her camp, which had been cut off and run south by Rangers, and gathered the People. The next night the People slept on a flood island in the Nueces, and Face-like-Horse became my great-great-great grandmother. Once again the Slagsted-Krummels were fated to ride.

No one has ever directly accused old Joseph of having been a Comanchero, but some people wondered why only three of eight able sons went to the Civil War and why there was Comanche trouble in the south where there had never been any. Of the half-breed sons who went to fight for Jeff Davis, secession, cotton, slaves, and economics, one returned, Frederic, named Nose by the People. One was killed at Elkhorn Tavern (the Bluebellies called it Pea Ridge because they won) and the other deserted and went to Florida. When Nose, my great-great grandfather was buried, he was the richest man along the river. White sentiment necessitated that Nose be buried in the earth, but inside the coffin his hair was still braided and his hands, folded in Christian forms of peace, were crossed and held to his breast a secret blond scalp taken in Alabama on one of Forrest’s railroad raids. Only the ranch, the family, and the Bible remained.

My grandfather joined the Canadian Army in 1915, and the only image he left me of that mad war in the mud was of creeping out of a trench on a night patrol and finding his arm sunk to the elbow in a rotted corpse. After only two months in the trenches, he said, he didn’t even gag. (We had no one in the Spanish-American War: the Slagsted-Krummel who might have gone refused to join the Rough Riders in San Antone because the name sounded so damned silly.) My grandfather was also the one who changed the family name, leaving out the hyphen, and using Slagsted for a middle name for all male children. But except for my father, none of his children followed the tradition.

My father was thirty-one when the Second World War began, and he missed the draft. He enlisted anyway. The Army, of course, tried to make him a cook, but he cooked badly and became a private in a rifle company. He fought in Africa and France without distinction, but not without honor, I’m sure, and returned to say only that it had been bad. But I knew what he meant. I knew; in spite of his silence, I understood why he went, why he wouldn’t talk, and how he came back.

I also knew all these things about the family because, as you’ve noticed, we Krummels are a verbose lot, and I joined the Army, the first time, in June of 1953. The truce was signed the next month. The old man had made me finish high school, and my education, as it will, cost me my war.

“And now we chose between tiny wars fought with booby traps and pamphlets and suicide… wars of attrition,” I said to Gallard as I finished my tale, the history. “Perhaps there is even honor in these, though. But I am afraid. They are being fought for ideals and in the name of freedom and liberty and they are the dirtiest wars man has ever known. I trust greed and passion and lust, but God! never politics.”

Gallard stood up to leave. A great sadness touched his face, shaded his eyes, etched his facial lines. “Why did you tell me this? I know you. I saw you murder women and children for fun, for stupid amusement. Why tell me?” He had begun to understand his use in my world, and wasn’t so sure he liked it; but he had wanted to know. “Why me?” He turned away, his shoulders shaking. “You stink of death, Krummel, evil murder and death and…”

“Don’t overwrite, man. The story’s just begun, doctor; only begun, not near finished.”

He left quickly, without a word. I knew he would be back. Unfair, you say, to use him like that? Who else could I talk to? Who else would listen? Only those whose fear is deep enough and whose pride is great enough to conceive me in their souls; a hidden, hesitant conception, true, but a real birth.

(All is not darkness, though. A letter came today. Cagle and Novotny are alive, not dead as I had thought. Cagle lost an arm and Novotny is deaf, but they are alive and back in the States already, waiting for discharge to start a bar in Fresno with their disability money. Cagle writes, “Look, ma, one hand clapping [no pun intended: there is no clap in the U.S.A.].” Novotny writes, “Great not to have to listen to the little bastard anymore.” God, I miss them.)

History, memory, or whatever you will call this foolish desire of mine to diddle the past, does present certain problems of relativity. It would be easier if I could, as authors of novels often pretend to do, be that objective, original, imaginative, righteous voice of God, but alas I am not. Nor am I able, as that other great multitude of confessors are, to act as if I have quietly moved, probably because of the deep understanding and perception I must have of my sins, to some distant point in the vacuum of space, disturbed only by occasional satellites, cosmic dust, and God, and there rest in peace as I recount my many and varied adventures. But again, alas, this is not so. For you see, I am still strapped to this bed in a traction cast, the sky over Baguio is still a sexual blue, the grass sensual green, Abigail Light lovely, lovely, and Doctor Gallard concerned. Life continually intrudes. I will neither deny this, as so many have, nor, though, will I make any other point about it than this intrusion. I see no reason why you should get off any lighter than me, for it was at this point in time — that is, the time of writing the narrative rather than the time of the narrative itself, different as it is from the time of the events being narrated — that Gallard brought me these sheets of yellow paper and this old typewriter, which so often seems to loom high over the bed like a great cathedral organ. Gallard brought them without explanation, but he and I both knew what he meant, what he wanted.

I found myself intrigued with the idea of a mechanical confession and began, as they say great writers must, to conceive my theory of aesthetics before I began to write. I quickly discovered that history was more interesting than art, and so instead developed the Blueberry Bush Theory of History, that is to say that Martin Luther King had as great a hand in causing the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War as Martin Luther. You may despair at this idea that no one and no thing is at the wheel of the ship of the cosmos, that there is neither wheel nor ship, but you would be smarter to laugh (and probably are if you did). Perhaps you may chide me for making elaborate jokes; point, if you will, your irritation elsewhere.

If, as they say, the writer’s duty is to force order on the chaos, then the historian must force chaos wherever he finds order.

Perhaps this is all a personal reaction to the fact that I never did find out who broke all those damned Coke bottles, and I’m merely hesitating in my narrative because I hate to go on with that kind of loose thread bleeding behind me. If it bothers you, then say I did it because I was punished for it and must be guilty. Nothing worth having is easy to get.

So despair then because history is no thread to be cut, no chain to rattle, no string to be wrapped in a ball. Eat your blueberries; keep the toilet paper close at hand.

* * *

My ill-temper must have rubbed off on the men, particularly on Morning who acted as if I had stolen his thunder, his lightning and tears. I didn’t find it easy in the weeks between the end of my tour of punishment and the beginning of football season to keep the self-disgust I felt out of my face. There were several bad scenes. Novotny finally received the long-feared Dear John from his girl back in Wyoming. He stayed sick and drunk for a long time — through a set of days, the Break, then a set of swings — then during the Break he and Morning nearly came to blows, as they regularly did, over the presence of Toni, Morning’s queer friend, at the apartment. Morning felt sorry for him, as everyone did. Poor Toni, half in, half out of drag, short hair and make-up, high heels and levis, painted fingernails and a sport shirt, always waiting for a chance to seduce Novotny, Novotny always ready to kill him if he tried, and Morning, it seemed, also waiting for the explosion. I often felt that Morning wanted to see this double-humiliation so he could feel superior (not afraid?). He and I hassled when I told him this, for in my mood I bluntly told him, and we tangled another time when Quinn wanted to stay in town AWOL from work. Morning said it was only Quinn’s business, but I made it mine. Then Dottlinger began his campaign to get Morning who, of course, was more than willing to be a martyr to this sort of injustice. And I… always with my crooked nose strained out of joint to get between the back and the whip…

On the way to the beginning of a set of mids, I found Tetrick sitting in the chow hall waiting for me. As I ate, he told me that Dottlinger knew that Morning had organized the Great Coke Bottle Mutiny.

“How do you know?” I asked. This could be bad, I thought. Capt. Saunders still wasn’t back from the States.

“I know, that’s all. But the lieutenant ain’t going to do anything right now. He’s waiting. Make sure Morning don’t get out of line, not even a little bit,” Tetrick said.

“How?”

“You tell me,” he said, shaking his head over a cup of coffee. “You tell me. These kids are driving me to drink. You know Hendricks, that little blond kid on Trick Four?”

“I think so. Why?”

“He’s in the stockade — excuse me, confinement facility, that is,” Tetrick snorted.