On Magnificent Apostates
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Taos, New Mexico
1847
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The Spaniards are very much irritated against the Americans, the Soldiers that steal from them, and vice versa. If we go south there will be 11 companies left here, and you need not be surprised to hear of another rebellion this Winter.
Albert L. Gay, 1847
In luxurious cities, where the noise of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, and injury and outrage; and, when night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
John Milton, 1674
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When you ask me why I hate, why with all the wretched governances of my heart I perpetuate the production of my blood so that I may spill that of the soldiers in blue, the Army of the West, this is all that I can begin to say.
It was eight months ago that I tried to farm; all the herding opportunities had dried up. I was putting down corn, whiter than the highest products of the quintessence surrounding the universe clockwise, drawing around. The corn was growing well and with a great heartiness, though it was winter, and I just couldn’t wait to sell it and keep some for mother. Every second was solid and my hands were tattered by frost, but the corn kept growing, against all predictions of harvest. She was about the size of a dried terrapin in her diminished age, yes, wrecked by grinding clumps of sand. I needed to feed her. She would say to me:
— You grow the corn?
— Yes, mama, yes I do.
— Watch the hill.
— Yes, mama, I will.
— It was so beautiful when you were born.
— Was it?
— Far from all else, it was what you looked at when you were begat.
— I need to open the stalks. Let me open the stalks.
— Leo?
— Yes, mama?
— Put me there, alright?
And so it was almost every day when three quarters of the brooding tree line were covered by great shadows, and cloaked in immovable darkness. It went the same, her propped against the embedded chimenea like a wooden bulto of sorrow, peering out the adjacent window from bubbled glass that distorted the mountain until it was nothing more than molten slag. I would put myself down likewise angled in an unbroken line against the floor—I would set myself and listen to her like a circuit. At the strike of the hour in the parade of ticks emanating from my watch I would get up and go check the stalks, because father said they should be peeled back and checked every eight hours. He went to Chihuahua and I did not put eyes on him again: he told me he knew that in his own gaze, that battles are not won unless one sees so much violence that they cannot remember what they do it for, and then their mind makes them the victor. Blazing idiots covered in blood is what he called it.
When it became harvest red—the resting leaves, the bursting, verdant bushes dotting the mesa, and the particulate matter all round floating in the air and into the sky. The earth itself was a mess of dripping vermillion, of the body and blood, as if we ourselves were growing in an organ. It all went out and even the mountain itself was dripping in that scorched sky. In that damned hall of ruby spanning the meridian, a few figures of sapphire yet crawled on through the far off horizon to here. They were atop what I could see were starved horses, and in their persistent, locked observance of the ground there was an all-certain inescapable poverty that not even I knew.
They had cheap, white sashes strewn across them, the whole lot, at a diagonal slant that made their whole shape crooked. One was adorned with badges like starred lees at the bottom of a barrel. He came forward and tried speaking to me but I couldn’t understand, though you ask me to record the words so I will at length give it an effort.
— You a greaser?
I said nothing.
— This one don’t know how to talk now. I’ll be durned if I ever seen it. Stupid ones everywhere.
I was at the same level as the horse. It turned away from me. The man in blue looked away.
— They can do corn though, looks to be. Can grow it out here in this godforesaken desert. They’d called it irrigation, methinks.
— You. Greaser. Git here up at my eyes. She dont got nothin to say to you, nothing right at all.
I didn’t know what to do.
From his back he conjured a flintlock and then I understood what he wanted.
— My men haven’t had nothing good as their horses sawdust to feed themselves for a full two days now, we being caught up on the evening. Would it be so hard to lend us some of that there corn you got planted? We’d pay ye afterwards.
I couldn’t understand his words but that facetious wretched lip he bore when speaking made it somewhat clear to me.
— Just go.
He threw his chin back to the men behind them and they came up on my crops. They stood still.
— Don’t be shy now, he said okay. Just git it done.
The flintlock came back and he held it with great pride, his humor now evident. He put it on my forehead, just on my cranium.
— Fucking toys, the whole lot. You ain’t nothing but barbarous. Like a child with their paper dolls I could rip you out and chew you with this here gun, and you’d have to mind me on it. Understand? ‘Course you don’t. Look.
While laughing, some of them now off their horses began to kick and hit wildly. They dashed my corn into the sand and a few of them dismounted and continued to stamp it down. Each and every stalk was destroyed, hacked, shot, and danced upon. One of them turned to me and in his eyes I saw a child, frolicking in some northern field; above his eyelid there was a spasm like all the unspoken hilarities of man joining in chorus to poke and prod at me for even beginning to look and question the laws of nature—the law being of power. In my dull and otherwise quiet soul, there was stirred a great typhoon against which not even the confines of my form could stand. The warm climes being my hatred and anger, it turned around with greater momentum each time to the point of bursting. He was staring at me as he threw out another cob; he wasn’t hungry
It was evening, then, still red with blood. They’d finished decimating my field and the rest of them looked to my house. The lead man with the flintlock tried to talk at me again but I couldn’t care to understand him. I just looked at the field. My mother needed the field and it was gone. I could still see speckles of the ears pounded and cast into the sand, away from my bountiful soil. Mother had been sleeping—she didn’t need to be waked.
I thought she was sleeping. When I saw them all cocked at my own worthless living I turned with them. Through the adjacent window I could see her distorted, magnified eye—whites and all—moving around, looking like an omniscient being into the scene. It was like a saucer she fed me from during the town days, you remember.
The one with the flintlock turned to me for the final time.
— My name is Tracey Falkrose. I want you to know that I give you my title because it makes you powerless, and in this civilized age of correspondence in which we live, nobody will ever hear a word you say. I want you to feel it, barbarous molerat of the south.
His face was grand and regal like that of a general. He was a good man, that is what I believed. With great care he got off the steed as if to apologize for the wreck and he went past me and to the house.
Her eye moved to the frame when he entered and now I could only see the sclerae strained by blood vessels.
My language fails. I watched him go in and suddenly the glass turned blue like his fabric, with a streak of white. It oscillated back and forth, back and forth like a driving wagon in the similes which no longer fit me or make sense. I could hear wailing and crying and howling through the wall and the glass warped further and I could see Mother’s face, her jaw agape like an animal but she wasn’t one she was my Mother but he had reduced her and taken her. Out and out and in and in i stood in the putrid, dying light with the other men—men, men, and I can only find repetition as a shaddy refuge because I can’t say it Marisol I can’t. The word can’t leave my mouth and I can’t write it down because I cannot see it. She was obscured again and it was only whimpering now, hush now, yes, don’t make him. The fixtures were crashing inside and I held myself—I didn’t. I can’t say, please don’t yet make me. They moved and now it was his face through the window—his wretched face. That same spasm of utter humor befell him and he was having fun, I just know it, in the lackadaisical monotony of it.
It all stopped and the world got to rustling again. They drove out wordlessly into the infinite expanses of what was to be called the Great American Desert because it was dictated by power.
I ran inside when they were gone and saw her ruined body splayed on the ground and I went into paralysis again. I can’t say it. She was not conscious and there was blood coming out in the below and her leg was twisted like the fangled branches you find in the middle of cracked basins.
I held her; she didn’t get better. She wasted away within the span of two nights because there was no food and the flesh became too much for her to bear.
I walked her first up to the mountain and laid her down. She was small.
I continued along the range and found Taos after weeks, and in it a revolution. I heard they killed a governor brought in from the United States, and so thus I am in the fold with the rest. We’re pointed outside a mill and there are more of the Army inside—there are hundreds of us, glorious and proud. It is our land to defend, and I can only hope to do so. There are men inside: I will get to them; though I may surely die, I give myself to the raging flames of obdurate hate. Lay me down with Mother.
Your brother,
Leocadio Pormuz
20th January, 1847
***
There were eight men at the start of the day and there are now three. Benjamin dared to peek out and his skull was caved by a piece of monstrous lead, and the splintered deck was now flitted with his brains and contrivances of matter. They aren’t letting up, the Mexicans, they aren’t going back. I brought three days of rations and dried grapes from down the river and I can only hope it’ll be enough. There was supposed to be artillery manned up here, too, but there is nothing to be found. I am the only one.
The writing helps—makes me feel important in the same sense as a father or founding man. I am a mountain man. I trap an’ I get fish from the Rio when it isn’t dried. I tell you this for little reason other than for some extant recording to remain of my life and its movements, down the line—however long it may be—in the hopes that its interpretation will be magnanimous.
We’re in a mill, and I do believe it will be the last four walls I ever see. When I came up to it three weeks ago it was much the same and I believed its sagging walls and torn distillery to be some kind of portentous. We’re on the first floor: it’s all basalt, blacker than the night sky that I will again never see. Polly is pointing his eyes at me with his method of turning his whites into lamps; you can’t look at nothing else. Against the oncoming slender tendrils of shadows drawing forth in midday ceremony, they are like dual lighthouses guiding me to shores of grinded up, all-touching sand that extend themselves across these great plains. I can hardly alternate between the parchment and his visage.
Benjamin is a trapper too—we all are. I tried to tell him it was bad work coming to Taos, how there was no money in it and only resentment to be found. They hate us, by all accounts, they harbor only the most bitter resentment for our country and its ways of democracy and the people it has created. There is nothing else to be thought of but the ravenous, all consuming venom that fills their barbarous eyes with every glance that has met me since entering this forsaken place.
That sun is yet high in the sky, and its beams are shattering on dusted sand like a million chalcedonies bequeathed to us, crushed under the boots of nigh five hundred savages and greasers in their serapes, like coverings to a feast in which we are the meal. They are all hungry, all underfed, all desperate to kill somebody because it will do the fixing. It will fix real good. When they cannibalize us it will be as cathartic as if we could put them all down and end all wars.
Benjamin’s body is looking at me. He cannot be fixed, no matter how much his skull is picked and pried apart like vultures—that is what they are. His eyes are pooled at the bottom with hemorrhaging blood and his arms are outstretched on the ground. Polly is looking at it too. He’s a halfmute idiot, Polly is; he’s deaf, too—in his incoherent babblings, he is told to any man not familiar with him as both, how far removed from speech his gargled saliva is.
While Polly looks at it, I can see that he is scribbling into his hand. He does that, too. I can’t bother to read it, for I value what little intelligence I have too highly to throw it away to such things. Even in our pits of utter wretchedness and blind stupidity we are more elevated to our Lord’s pedestal than the barbarians which will now bring our death. They are standing still. Somebody will turn up and get shot, too, and then there will be two. Polly and I are watching the body and our only living companion, whose name I never got, is cowering right below the parapet; he’s gripping a smoothbore musket like it will save him to pick off once more before they go through his head. He is reflected off the smooth, paned window above with a blue.
Don’t pick them off. Polly’s whites are going again. Don’t pull it. I can’t speak and he can’t read.
The man sprang up and like a work of luck he was met, in the chest, with an arrow. It plunged first inwards, the tip traveling through to meet my gaze, covered in blood. He fell down from our makeshift balcony and back onto the floor with a crack. He convulsed and his face was grimaced as if he had any method to know what befell him. He held his own neck and palpated it for a confirmation and then went back limp.
And so we were two. Polly got a start from it and came back after the descent. His pupils went big and his visage darkened. He was two sizes too small for his body. His ways are blameless. Some creator foresaked him and his consciousness. He couldn’t ever think nor feel like me. Don’t realize it. He never will quite.
It is I and Polly who now hold the vestiges of this Mexican territory in our hands, and not for the better. The governor was here yesterday—he’s dead, too. The fighters, champions of freedom, broke into his home and shot him dead in the midst of his family, and killed them too. Once a son of a bitch, always a son of a bitch. They’ll do it again, and it will be some other poor sentinels placed in a distillery and left for dead—it is what they are meant to, and one can’t fight that, just as Jesus could not help to be honest crossing upon Galilee. The Lord could not envision what I have put upon myself here, nor will I be able to imagine how posterity will revolt against my words in ways I can only imagine doing to myself.
Polly doesn’t know about much of it.
I went west, originally, because I believed it to be the pilgrimage to the promised land, and because it was a promise from God to see this republic to its ends and beginnings.
No, I must give myself the truth. I am ashamed. What of my writings when my final moments are expelled from this place? I am sicker than Polly, and an even greater idiot. For this I can only loathe myself more than the gunmetal powder which I must dust away from the parchment. It is stupid reasoning.
It strikes on. They’re silent.
I was pulled westward, because the coats were ample and the fares cheap. The governor is dead, and the savages are at the gates with cruel grins, waiting, waiting like us, and I can only think of coats. I wanted a big house in California, and with it I would put my money, because I was sick with it. Please put it back, Polly. Benjamin is lying, slumped off, still dripping. We are all desolate.
I am struck with such hate; it is all unfair. They’ll rip us apart, and nothing we can do to help it. How do I look at myself, my only beholder in death a halfmute, gurgling beast. I wanted the coats and the herds, and now here I lie. Damn it all, I renounce it. Damn the lies of Job, be him a better man than I; in the pallor of Satan he turned to God: and so I turn away from His equivalence in my country and instead towards the only comfort which I can now know.
I was a boy, then, when I became a trapper, and shall I die a man, it will be in utter defiance of the powers of the universe and the riders granted to roam the stars, so elite they are. Put it down, Polly. I went down the sunlit Rio which I once called a friend. Damn it all. I can only think to grasp and hold myself. The walls are shivering and the shadows grow crooked, the sun having passed its rotten acme. We are all lying dead, some of us still moving. Polly? Say something, Polly, you daft idiot, say it. Capers are all around, drenched in starred yarrows.
I cannot damn this country to the hell which it has taken to acquire. It is all magnificent. I’m saying it aloud as I describe it. It is all so magnificent. God keep us, and my words.
Turning in,
Obadiah Jackson
January 20th, 1847
***
I am walking by the magnificent oh yes how magnificent tentacles of sweet red with Pa and Pa says to me: “Boy it is only so long before you will go on to the fighting, because we just took Texas and that means war and you are of age.” Pa says that it’s only honorable to go down to where the fighting is because it is what men do, yes they fight. I began to cry because the orchard was spinning and one of the apples had a worm in it and Pa was not sure what to do with me; I think he thought I liked apples. I can’t get it out to say it fully because I’m spilling right out of my mouth again and I am still crying but I want to hurt the tree. All around are squirming bugs and what remains of the apples because it is close to winter and they are going brown. The day is going down and the sky is rotting and I look at it and start on hushing. I’m laying down in the dirt now because it’s cooler than the air and Pa is nursing my head and I go mute and I can see the packs of clouds moving like foals with lightning their drivers to the basin of night. It’s a storm out and I come up an Pa takes me in saying “There, ruck up, we got it in. You’ll get broth, now.” I miss the apples back then and it made me happy and there were only so many times when it would all spin and I would have to cry.
“Place it here, like so, just like that, Polly.” Pa was showing me the big flintlock, shiny brown.
“Magnificent, just so.” My sister said. I was pouring the powder in.
“Yes, that’s the last of it. Close it up with the paper.” Pa is holding half of it for me and I’m done pouring it just right..
I am banging the stick down and up again to push it all down and it sounds itself like a gun going off. The stick is going and I’m loading it nicely. Pa looks at me proud like I just walked but my sister isn’t looking like him. In her eyes are tears like great crystals and they’re welling up. I don’t want her to cry because then I may. I need to hold it steady and clear like in the picture. Yes, just like the picture.
“Yes, you’re done with the powder. Put it up now, Polly.” Father is still proud but he can see me trying.
“Yes, magnificent. You’ll make good as a soldier. You make people happy. I am filled with joy that you will be good for us. Please be good.” She’s holding my head.
I will be good for her because she is crying and she cries when she’s happy and now war is love and love is joy; when she puts me to sleep at night I love her and then i love the fighting.
“Where do you come from.” The sir across from me asked. I had not seen Pa in two weeks and I was beginning to feel sick. It was nighttime again and the cart was going down by the water and the trail had little teeth in its prairie dogs. I saw the stars running thick in the mirror stream from upwards like washed lilies in molasses and they were shimmering and I watched them glint and I wasn’t looking at him sir. The water is low quite low and only thinning out because it is coldtime.
“Do you answer.” The sir said to me. He was much higher than me though our seats were equal and he looked like a bent willow in his black shade against the whisping dark.
“I start. Wilhelm. You call it. Ingolstadt.”
We are carted off to fight but I can’t get it out. I wanted to tell him about my sister because I knew she needed me to stand up nice but Wilhelm wants to tell me more.
“You are mute. We are going to pick up after Kearny, so I have heard. There are talks of revolution with the Mexicans there and we will end it. Where will you go?” I don’t want to spill or gargle in front of the sir but he can’t see me in the dark often broken by spots of fire.
“You really are. Have you considered the principles which govern our blasting into this war?”
I could feel the words going through me but I didn’t much see or understand them and thus I turned to the floor and the chipped wood with all its little scars like my hands—they had little bumps and welts and I don’t remember how I got them. The sir Wilhelm is bending over at me and the bad feeling in my blood is there again but it is all magnificent because I am her brother. We are going on and bumping in the dark and it feels as if it will never end. I am thumbing my gun because it is my stick and I am the herder and my own flock and my wool protects me in the night. I want my blanket yes but it isnt here and the cold makes me want to cry. In the rustlings of the bleached grass I can see her softly running towards me because she misses me right yes. Her eyes are the stars for me.
We come in and everything is higher and the air feels thin. All around there are peaked mountains with little caps of snow and it makes me think of Pa and the winter and how somebody has to warm the house. I didn’t get trusted with the oil but I tried and got burned on my knuckles. It is all teeming with moving ground like scurrying bedbugs in my sheets. I wanted to have sheets again out of the wash. It’s right cold as she said and it is all the magnificent nippings of frost. Wilhelm calls it Taos. The town comes in and the street is littered with done-in wheels and everybody is tired and quite thin even the trees. They like heads on sticks with bulbs poking out of match-thin branches. The savages—Pa says savages—and the whites alike were going around and scratching themselves senseless to go from hunger to something nicer. It is very quiet and I am scared and Wilhelm isn’t looking. I began to hold my lip and try for her.
In the starving people our wagon comes to a stop and I am told,
“Go to the station and register.”
Pa says I am a mountain man and he told it to the man in blue back home and handed me my gun. I am a mountain man. Wilhelm got off the cart and went away into the masses and I could see his head poking through. He went away and didn’t come back. Everything was washed in a kurnamesent film like some flowing citrus to cover up the smell only it wasn’t working with every smoke stack and rumble of the sick gut.
I was woken up in the night on the floor, tugging at my cot like her dress and we eight were all alone and it was Benjamin who had taken to pushing me to open my eyes because we had been keeping watch. He said, “They’re going for it. By God, they’re going to take the whole thing.” Benjamin was a big man and much tougher than me and he never cried.
We have to protect the mill is what we are here for. The mill is set right and will be the first to go if the savages start killing.
Benjamin: “They’re coming down from the town. These are truly the last days. They’ve gotten the governor, too. It’s all gone to hell.” I wanted to go back to bed and I liked my dream. “Damn you to hell too, Polly, and what force sent you here.”
It is all dark and we are blind. I am running to the mill when Obadiah catches me and I can feel his aged wrinkles on my back.
“Go forth, you blithering idiot. Run, faster. Don’t be useless in our final hours.”
Do not put me down. Do not pick me up. I am not a baby.
I was going as fast as I could but my leg was asleep and felt like silverfish inside.
We are dashing like squirrels through the black and I can see the sky full of little blinking stars and below the firmament the in and outs of fire and moving shadows of men and all along the rocky watchtower like bugs they are going along like mad and with every insistence and glinting pearl in the whites of their eyes I can see them coming towards us on their thin steeples of bone because they are starved and no food made them go crazy and one of them has a pike with limp scalp on it and underneath is magnificent red with tufts of hair and it is their flag waving in the wind of the early year and they are leaping round because war is love and love is joy and there are green beads dangling like poked out gazes pointing at fields like home and I can see my sister bent and twisted through them and we are still running and the mill is bigger now and I want to run home and lead the starving indians to my father with the head of a governor because he can watch me hit them with my gun and be proud and it will be magnificent and just so because I am a mountain man and he did not lie.
Polly
[January 20th, 1847]
***
The day’s just changed. Dusk is in its nascent stages and we were moving into the mill because we thought we picked off the last one. It would be ours, and all of Taos, and, all of my fires quenched, I could return to you, my sister, and we could take off from this landscape. Perhaps we could even find Father, wherever he cast himself to. It is standing tall and so am I, creeping in. They thirst for the blood of the Americans, dead or alive, like vultures; I cannot say I am different. They take our food, our women, our children, and they put us in prison. I’ve heard the same from the other Indians. We are not a cursed people. The Army of the West is not ours, and today we have shown it to the East and farther. This is not a land of slavery, nor is it a land free to be acquired or purchased at the end of the bayonet. Armijo relinquished Santa Fe without blood and fury—not so, not so! I rebuke his cowardice. There can be no doubt as to which of these two continental republics is responsible for a war that feelings of equity and just respect for civilization would have prevented.
I am inside. There are bodies of the ones we shot in the morning. One of them is slumped over with his head lying out of his skull and the now coagulated blood in clumps along the floorboards. He’s larger than a sleeping bison, and we snuffed him out with one shot. There are others, too: the coward. His hair blew up atop the barricades and we trained our sights on it: he peeked. One of them pulled out the arrow through his torso and drank the blood before kicking what was left of his head to a snap. Only days ago I was with mother and our harvest, only days. We counted six—there were eight that we saw. We moved to the second floor.
There was nothing here. We are like an unaccompanied morada in the deepest chasms of the Sandia and there is only silence. There were eight. There are tasteless zephyrs pulling south in the sealed off and supposed tombs. I look behind: there is a shattered frame and beyond it lies the currents of changing sky. There are fragments of glass lying where corpses should be.
A few men go closer. I am shortened. They’ve slid out, the inhuman reptiles. The violent, unthinking savages are gone and with them my final sympathies for any fighting man in blue. They’ve robbed us of even the smallest of victories and triumphs; my corn, our mother. They’ve escaped. They’ve escaped. And now the army will come, and so I must lay down my life. We are moving out. There is a church with sympathizers, and it is where my hatred will finally find its vector in the unsuspecting, stupid flesh of the soldiers that have become thieves of all spirit.
Remaining your brother,
Leocadio Pormuz
21st January, 1847
***
The door has broken down and they are spilling out all over the carpet. It is by dark and we are playing checkers, me and Teresina, and she is the black pieces. She is winning and I have a few pieces left when they come in. At first it was a rattling noise like an engine of steam, and then it became violent and I thought it was kit or somebody else and that the door was locked for them. Daddy went up to it before it flew down and they came in, men bedazzled in old hickory and little shimmering bones. It is too dark outside but they move quickly and some of them are holding sharp sticks. All of them are hard and sunbaked with eyes like swollen shut together with hair, sickly black cats.
I am in my turquoise dress that Father got for me down in santa fe and it is the brightest thing we have and he calls me his little Sapphire when he wants to make me feel happy and right good. He knew I liked the dryness of Taos when he carted us out here after kearny came down and claimed this New Mexico. I am holding my breath and my face is also blue. One of the men, his hair turned down with bows and sap, spotted me and gazed into my eyes and they were blue too and piercing like a focused prism. He was sad like he was about to do something. In his left hand there was a bow, yes, a bow; he’s putting an arrow between his two fingers. He’s still looking and I can see his nostrils flaring up and down again like he’s running.
He takes up the bow and he’s pointing it. I broke my gaze and went to Daddy and he was frozen. His face was white and he wasn’t looking at much of anything. They say some things and I don’t hear it much and cant understand.
The man with the bow lets go of the arrow and shoots Daddy. The stick goes through his middle and I can see it sticking out the back. There’s red everywhere and I wish I wasn’t blue anymore. The staring one isn’t doing it anymore but the other men run up to him. They are tearing at Daddy now and mother is screaming but she stays put behind me; I can’t see her. Daddy is spilling more red now and they’re picking him up. He’s slobbering like virginia used to and I can see him cough. teresina is crawling away and he’s crying.
They are picking him up and some of the leaner ones are drawing their knives and I hate them. Daddy is still whispering and I can see him dazed.
I can read his lips: Precious. Precious. Hold your mother.
They put their knives up to his hair and they are cutting away at it from the forehead and back to the neck. It is all so red and I want to get it, but I cant. Daddy is outing with cracked notes and flailing; I find myself mimicking his drubs like it will do something but it cant. Please put him down, put him down.
They drop Daddy and he’s only moving a little now and his head is bare and they are holding his hair. They are solemn and I hate them and want to rip at them.
Daddy is the governor and he has the power. They can’t do it, they can’t. They can’t take him because I am the Sapphire and they didn’t even think about that or kill me too. I am rushed out by kit and I don’t think I will ever see him again and the fires go out.
kit is holding me along his breast and I can’t see the scene anymore but I can hear the carpet going and rustling though it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t. It is Daddy moving and I want to go back to him but I cant, I can only ask from the lord that he must stop moving, let him that. Afford him that, lord. kit is running through the back and now I am sure we are not far from outside. mother is on the back of kit and we are all wailing and spouting but the savages aren’t following. I can’t hear the rustling anymore and the world feels a little more silent than it once was.
For me,
Estifina Bent
January 19th, 1847
***
We have been on the move for two weeks, the army behind us at every turn. They have mortars they test and fire on us with every passing hour, and their demonic generals can only help but smile as we are blown to pieces.
We first went through the shrouds of the Taos Valley, enveloped in an overhanging mist like vice in a tavern for its own sake. Every second entirely grey with the melted snow mixed with mud and patches of mushrooms springing up like cities. There were tracks dug out and colonies of grass in each divot, so the whole visible place began to look like a fertile series of nations flooded by monsoons and lilypads. In the stream, there is also blood. Somebody is bleeding at nearly all times. The mounts are nearly all untrained and unbroken and they are merely walking along with us; they are no help. For every broncho there are three men and yet somehow we all lurch equally in the snow-packed mud that moulds into something entirely foreign to any disciple of vision. The seeping warmth of the earth present in the mud somehow coexists with the frost. Each step through it fills my boots and we all are panting dogs. There is no divide between this blackened matter and the sky it dwells under, and we are all together clutching and groping through purgatory. May the Lord bind us to our mission, though we suffer so.
We are hobbling north, close to the Sangre de Cristo. We kept walking in a desperate need to find the pueblo, for there are yet some sympathizers to our cause, some who wish to defend the Mexican homeland, some who do not yet wish to be subject to this farce of American destiny. It is the hobblings of madmen that declare they are too strong, too almighty. What is a revolution but a fight against the invincible? Was this not the victorious cause upon which both of our republics were founded and allowed to prosper so, amongst the civilized and collected world? Now that we may dare to dislike the reign of the soldiers who defile our land, we are to be killed without ceremony amongst people so utterly apathetic to their own survival. It is an egregious defacement of Hidalgo and his cause, the cause of independence, that we allow it to be so easily revoked in the name of some selfish preservation of life. Cowards, the whole lot. Bloodless yellowbacks with shells fit for snails and pockets filled with pesos, all of them.
Aye, forgive my idealisms, sister, it is only a product of my worn soles and furthertattered centre. It need not be said that I would much prefer to write to you in love, for it is the binder of all things both altruistic and violent, and yet I am so mystified by these unspeakable horrors—wrought by the union—that I must consign myself to the framework of analytical politics, lest I behold further their consequences.
I can see the ensnared shadows of my comrades covered in clouds of steam. We are all, far apart, trudging towards it. It will be the place of our last stand, and I promise that regardless of my fate, many Americans shall die in the quenching of my thirst, because it is out of love—my love for you.
Within the hour we can see it: the raised, conjoined cubes are forming a single steeple, packed with windows and colorful rags, the first genuine ones I’d seen in weeks across the bleak stretch. All around it are raised beds of rock: this is safe. When the Army of the West picks up on what is left of our trail, they will be met with righteous fury and bloodshed. It is a miracle that such a church can exist here in otherwise ruined and cowardice lands like these. It began with Texas, and it will end here. Upon this battle we will build a new church, free of all oppression and for the sake of the Mexican people, the only deserving beholders of this land.
Utterly desolate,
Leocadio Pormuz
1st February, 1847
***
Polly is gone. I don’t know where to, exactly, but he ran as fast as he could when we finally broke through the mill and out through the valley. I was holding his mouth the whole way out, useless scum, and trying to avoid the sirening of his cries being travelled out towards our belligerents. The savages somehow missed us, by some grace, and we just kept moving—it was not yet Fate’s wish to let me die. When we got far enough out, to the point that we could barely hold in our own chests, we collapsed into the ceaseless muck and basked in its cool as if it were snow. Polly was laughing. I should have stayed back, let them storm the mill, with the idiot as well. We may have gotten to call ourselves valiant, maybe come across some decent men afterwards. Now our only pantheon houses the Judases and Arnolds of the world; if the army finds us, we’ll be killed right alongside those more barbarous revolutionaries—not us, Polly is gone. He got up out of the valley and simply kept walking, without a word. He stumbled along. The desert is his, now. I can only hope that the unforgiving throes of parched tongue and blistered feet take him before myself.
The glow of the night was only further present in his bloodshot eyes upon his exit from the stage. If I had my pistol and ball, I would have taken him right then and there—honest. But I don’t wish it. I can’t wish it. I must hate it all, though him I hate the most. Amongst the unnamed colors of ancient growth that encompassed my frame, I must say, with the utmost pride, that I no longer wish to be myself. How strange it is, how unforgiving it is, to be helplessly racked with such greed. I am ashamed. I am worn out. The basin is cracked from cold, not heat. Reply to me, Polly, you begrudging and hesitant saint, you idiot. I miss the glow because I will never find it again. No amount of sickness or fur will push it. The savages will move up, and the army with them. Yes.
I must also mention that I have been found. I was awoken to the cough of gunpowder and the cold metal of a barrel, and I took back my eyes and made acceptance; they didn’t fire. I was the only artillery man in the whole of the north, and they supposed I was needed. Afterwards, I will most definitely be killed for desertion. Quickly, with the throng of the bayonet at my rear, I was marched atop an overlook from which the church was visible. They say there are rebels inside and I can hear the desperate rustling. Everybody is thinner than when I last laid eyes upon them, union and Mexican alike, but I am not allowed to think anymore.
There is nothing left for me, save the ultimately wretched image of myself that now must, for the last time, obliterate what isn’t mind. It is all so magnificent, the destruction—or at least it will be. Many men plugged their ears, but not me. I am consumed by ringing for ever. My only rhythm is that of my own heart, beating in spite of myself. God curse it all, strike it all with my aid. I am consumed in hopeless revolt and I can only imagine the hate which will burst forth from that church with its walls as they come down like mudslides back home. I don’t wish it. I don’t wish it.
It goes so quickly when I aim and I am barely a person, but only a vehicle for resolution. I will do good. Perhaps Fate will call to me again, and spare me as she has done for Polly. Blast it all, before I myself am done. Blast the church and this territory and its savages and its mutt spaniards, blast it all; for these are the sons of the damned, and I now walk among them.
I write this with my own heaving ribs as my study. It is all that will support my words, save the suppliant knee of the dead agitator. I take it all with language, my final mortal moments dedicated to the spit I raise at thee. Let it be known that I am sick, and this was the cure. All else is farcical.
Looking up,
Obadiah Jackson
February 4th, 1847
***
Tomorrow there will be more of us, dear, I promise. With each passing minute, another will rise and take up the cause.
It began this morning. The shadows of night were only just starting to descend down the twisted ribs of mountainous rock when the firing commenced. Many were sleeping, all piled together like wash rags down at the acequia back South and all our cowskin was marred and modeled by changing winds; we formed a range. Every hint of fermented air exhaled through the windows and puffed back in through the doors, barricaded and stacked with old furniture and nails. There still lies capped peaks of frost atop the taller slumps and shoulders, and a thick layer of collective breath rises like smoke from the clearings of summer. The walls are packed with clay before they come down upon us and some straw still juts out like prairie dogs.
It began this morning. The first shot tore through the wall close to our mound of rest and the barrier was suddenly dust and debris, flying and ricocheting, everybody up and running, now. A chunk of rock ripped a man’s leg, frail and ghostly, and he lay still drooling and lapping it up, alone, trampled and snuffed out like charcoal amongst those that fled. Another. Our guns were lost, splintered, and thus it was all terror again. I must try to divulge the completely infantile and babied stares lighting across the floor, fleeing cannons. I saw men who were no longer fighting against Americans from the point of the crippled Mexican and the massacred Indian. All I could bear to witness was blind terror. The revolt did not exist. It never existed, not anymore. They picked out their hair with plucks as if to raise and sucked on the barrels and butts like children to their own creased thumbs.
I knew in those first strikes that it was lost, perhaps not as a product of some greater malaise present among us, nor anything resembling cowardice—though the sight ostensibly reflected both; we were frightened, that was all, and that is different from cowardice. We wanted our mothers and in that moment the days of walking and trying and killing revolved back in their annual eclipses and we came to the much more frightening realization that we were simply men being annihilated by metal, turned and stabbed silently, stepped over, and otherwise slaughtered.
I hold myself in words, but in action I do not. I jolted with them as if whipped, because I, at last, feared to die. I held myself because you were not there, and nobody would do it. The blasts stopped for several hours and we picked out the dead and laid them up where the wall once stood. I looked out from the gap and for a moment I saw them, the objects of my desire: stood in row and uneven in the formation of jagged teeth, each more built with filth than flesh, the sick cannibals. I still had my rifle. And what if I were to point it, sister? What then?
The sun creeped up to its climax, and it started again. Many began to throw up their hands out of the windows in fright and desperation.
I cannot begin to say it because it is too terrible. Tomorrow, I want there to be more. I want every man to rise in both parts shame and hate, as Cain rose against his brother in name. And it can’t, it can’t. Please, find her in the mountain just where I put her. She would look at it when the malignant red of sky in all its collapsing parts was all there was.
At night they came down, the soldiers, and into the ruined church. My own men raised their arms and tried to defy their force but without thinking they were blown apart with the conjoined fire of thirty muskets at their hearts, and so they crumpled like rotten cottonwood back down into the sand. They stamped into them until the Indians were pulp and crushed fruit while they kept gasping and I noticed that one man was watching from atop the cliff.
Tomorrow there will be more because there must be, there must be more men in Santa Fe or in Raton or in the mountains, yes the mountain men, they will save us, darling.
I could feel what was left of the Pueblo de Taos rumbling and heaving under its own unsupported weight; I know it will be going soon. I was still by the barricade with all the dead men forming its newest layer. I went out and saw. A man in tattered leather, his face lean and stretched to its finest vertices by drought and famine, was being knelt down into the muck now logged with blood and spilled kerosene. His legs were covered in the once-sand and its iris of reflected oil stained like cinnabar, taking down and down. They were going to shoot him and put him out.
Underneath he wore cheap fabrics to keep himself warm, though they were almost entirely dashed now. He looked up with venom and pressed teeth and he both parts cursed and praised God in song and shouts but he didn’t fear. His eyes were closed and he didn’t fear. I wanted to never fear again. He cursed the burro who brought him down with the Ute and thanked it for its strength and cursed God for making him a beast of burden in the hopeless struggle. The blood first came out of the eyes and then the forehead, and his ether spilled out from everything after. The lead ball ripped out and he fell into it, his mouth wide open and eyes returned to play.
And I am trembling at the sight of his body, sister, because I hate it. I feel overcome by consumption and as if I will never breathe again. Air isn’t moving, and it never will. In all our years of solitude I have never seen a man die so carelessly and with such savagery as to deny that he was ever a man at all. It is that violence; violence that waits for us and meets us at every turn. The plague of violence will bring about a revelation, and this revelation will speak unto us, that we never meant to be Man at all. All this while he goes limp and it stops coming out. I am watching from inside behind the wood, and the soldiers can’t see me but more are coming down. The ground is full of hornback climbers and ribs of ancient, blackened magma. The sky is cast in steel.
Tomorrow. Yes, it will be tomorrow. All the vengeful spirits will spring out of the arroyos and fight with me because they must. There will be more of us. I am holding myself when they find me.
Leocadio Pormuz
5th February, 1847
***
This will be my final letter.
Please know me as Obadiah Jackson, for all time.
February 6th, 1847.
Night came, and the Pueblo de Taos was now scattered amongst the sands. With the great bricks lie countless bodies and the flowing of blighted, starved innards, crushed and mangled. All of the lights had gone out and all that lay above were the wonderful and magnificent, ripely hanging stars. In every remaining man’s eyes there was a glint of blistered harp, some parts blood and gem. Every gaze was a flower and I almost fell to love again before I remembered what would be done to me by these same men. We are moving out and they have put me in chains next to those they managed to capture before another could find the time, and the decency, to shoot them. We are all going down to Santa Fe and there I will be hanged with the rest, for I am a deserter.
The man up front is no man at all. He is a boy, small with wrists thinner than the most famished stalks in the dead of winter. He is skipping along as if he is eager to see what comes next, and I am once again filled with vile, burning jealousy. His hair is entirely matted with done-in curls, twisted by fingers and stress and time and sand. His copper loops are fashioned on thin and cheap linen with wearing around the bottoms where he has held his fingers. His thin legs are hairless and mangled with rickets and pestilence, so sickly they are, and so logged with water. His arms are much the same. Had I known nothing of his origin I would have thought him an infected child of consumption, but he was not. He was a rebel who would now die for his cause, and I am the trapped insect, writhing alone in my circumstances.
He is, in stature, no taller than the desk which will hand down his sentence, and just as much alive. He can’t have been younger than a seventeenth year.
He must have felt my stare and so he turned to meet me. His face was caked in ruined adobe and gunpowder. We are now treading through ivory vines of pumpkin that precede red mesas as we come down to Santa Fe. In his eyes my broken body is bent and twisted, though I can begin to see my own visage. I cannot bear to describe it.
In all that remains of my mortal capacities, I summon the wind and the blood to ask him a question, because it must be done.
“And who are you?” I say to him.
“Leocadio.” He replies. His voice is pitched like a songbird not fit for war. I am surprised they did not kill him at the Pueblo.
He goes silent in between the rhythms of footstep. The orange sand is kicking up with its little pebbles. I wish to ask him another question but I have fear in my heart. I do not wish to have fear in my heart; it aches me. The fear aches me and I almost cannot step forward. Fear is why I write so, even as I am marched in links down to my finality. Fear is why I marched and why I let them march me, and it is why this boy must hate me.
“Why will you die?” I say to him again. It doesn’t seem to go through him, and he is looking at me with translucent, blue eyes. The war is not yet over and there is more of California to get, and they will further into Mexico from there. I do not want to repeat my question, though I know he will never answer me.
Leocadio was just a boy. Leocadio was just a boy and I killed many just like him.
We are all stopped and one of the men, his face fat and full of sweated-off grease, cut my lines and took me to the side. Leocadio stopped and looked at me with his welled-up eyes and I could see that he was not far from Polly and would soon begin to cry. The man is furious because I am scribbling down while staring at the boy because I must write, but he is not taking my paper away; for this I must thank him.
The clouds are moving, always moving, up and down; they are pouring out ways away and the Acoma must be giving thanks to San José for his waters and his miracles. I must do it as well. It is all a citrus ocean with clashing waves and leviathans in the shape of thunder.
They bend me down and I can feel the ringed metal piercing through my hair as they jam it through me. I am looking up but then I hear heaving sighs from the boy. I notice at last what I am waiting for: his lips are red and unchapped. He is innocent, though he hates; loving, though he kills. And so am I. Ah! the barrel is pushing me down, but I can still see his hands. It is all so magnificent and then
***
The ground turns white nearer Santa Fe. It is wet and it is snow, melting in a briny pool of dirt to become fields, pink like rows of hearts. I can turn around and see the mountain in its pool where mother is, too. The world is all a pond, and I am moving upon the face of the waters.
After they shot the old man, and the sun finally came up, I saw it:
It was a pinzón montano negro gliding down into our valley. Its wings—sharper than the American blade—were flapping softly as it came to the ground and looked at me from the foot up. Its head of grey feathers went flat as the snowcap to some distant peak. It came into rounds and rounds of brown plates, intersecting one and other with white trims, beginning the garden along its ridges. In its buff soil grew roses of shelled beauty that I could only love. They sprang out from its body as if they could redeem me, though translucent they were against their living garden. They went up into the appendages and down to the legs because beautiful things spread, because people love them and care for them. The pinzón followed me and with its round, embedded eyes, inspected my filthy form. And in it was simplicity—though I lavish it—and in it was love, and in it was me and all men who felt love. And in my love I hated; I hated my chains and the men who put me and my country in them.
Its beak is hanging open in empty anticipation and I am stopping. I am shortened again because the soldiers are yelling at me to walk further, but I can’t, and I feel no terror. I feel no terror because of my pinzón.
My eyes are satisfied with seeing and my ears satisfied with hearing. I am waiting for its song, the song of roses in the snow, the red, fine snow, unknowing to my god or my love, and it is all magnificent. Sing, my pinzón; sing, my magnificent apostate.
For you,
Leocadio Pormuz
6th February, 1847
An Appendix
_______________
Leocadio Pormuz (1830 - 1847)
Born in either the summer or late autumn of 1830 amongst the First Mexican Republic, to his mother, father, and sister—Marisol, five years his senior. He did not speak his first word until he was six years old. After participating in the revolt at the Pueblo de Taos and the siege at the Turley Mill, Leocadio was arrested and taken to Santa Fe, where he was found guilty of treason and executed by hanging in the public square at age seventeen. His body was racked with starvation. His convicted evidence proved to be the variety of crumpled letters found in his pockets, all addressed to his sister; her whereabouts, as with the rest of his family, remain unknown.
Obadiah Jackson ( 1795 - 1847)
Born—as far as can be ascertained—in Vermont, little is known about Mister Jackson. He has no record amongst the annals of the United States Government until his encounters with several volunteer regiments in the occupied territory of Santa Fe, where he was working as a fur trapper. Though caught in the siege at Turley Mill, Mister Jackson reportedly deserted along with Polly, another man of the same dubious employment. He was later found and apprehended; thanks to his unique skills in artillery, he was brought to assist at the battle at the Pueblo de Taos. In the aftermath of this battle and the capturing of the revolutionaries, Mister Jackson was taken aside and shot by an unknown infantryman, reportedly while writing with madness in a decaying journal; all declared intentions proved to be for his own self, and no other contacts could be found. Along with any of his valuables, this journal was taken and presented to the tribunal.
Polly
His origins are entirely unknown to this government, save for his own (almost wholly indecipherable) recordings. From these, it can be gathered that he was born a lunatic somewhere in the proper country, where his father hired him out—fraudulently—to a trapping company which carried him through Texas to the occupied New Mexico territory. From here, it is assumed that he encountered Mister Jackson in Taos, shortly before the revolt’s incitement, leading to his encirclement in the siege of the Turley Mill along with nine other trappers, Mister Jackson included. After the two deserted, Polly appeared to escape into the unmarked desert—as testified by his counterpart. He has yet to be found, and all evidence of his existence can be traced to Mister Jackson’s journal, and Polly’s own, self-necessitated writings.
Estifina Bent(1840 - )
On January 19th of this year, Charles Bent, the military governor of New Mexico, was scalped alive in his own home by Indian revolutionaries tied to the larger Spaniard conspiracy to overthrow the United States Government. Estifina, one of Gov. Bent’s children, was present and witnessed the entire affair, along with the Governor’s immediate family. It is unknown where she—such a young child, indeed—learned to read and write, but her testimony was provided, in scrawled-out calligraphy, by the Governor’s widow at the substantiation of her own accounts. The current whereabouts of the remaining family, Estifina included, are unknown at this time.