A Clash of Civilisations, A Song of Redemption

A CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS, A SONG OF REDEMPTION

Part I: From Westport to the Nueces River

They came for him as the night set on a dark and bloody ground. They came with saws, and boards and sodden rags that they pushed between his teeth. He fought them with a ferocity that had lurked unseen deep inside of him. Yes, even he who would see three civil wars with all their hatred and hurt. He lay on the soaked ground breathing heavily. He was alone. Had he woken from a final delayed dream of battle or was he already in some other land? Painfully he lifted himself up.

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Brachiopods and sea horses and other ichthyoid clusters pass above. Grey, nimbused creatures swimming before the wind. Their shapes are permeable, illusory, clumps of water that play like finger shadows in candled rooms. They have extinguished the last star and there is only eternity gaping through their Protean contours. The rain woke the Captain. It splashed the ground like a thousand stallions pissing. It drenched him in his hammock. And though the trees sheltered him from the down-pourings, they gathered in their crannies surfeits of water that the wind dislodged in torrents. At dawn the rain ceased. There was a pink sheen in the east and a mist that hung on the trees in horizontal swathes making ghosts of them. And the Captain leant forward into the new day, uncertain of his tenancy in the world. He might not yet wish to declare that he was dead but he lacked assurance of the continuance of his earthly life. He rides south and his mind is locked in some dreadful crevice of his soul. He thinks of his old regiment lost in Mexico. He leaves the Nations as the sun dissolves the mist. Skirting the Camino Real he follows the traces of Spanish drovers and mountebanks. Bounty hunters yet lurk on the Camino for buccaneers like he. So he heads due south. He disappears down dust trails long blown away. He enters the interstices of the world. In dry lands of scrub pine cicadas saw through the day’s zenith. He watches his shadow change. An elongated stick man, black as a thousand nights, rides with him. He is confirmed in his transience. There are midges in the air as he enters San Patricio.

Part II: From San Patricio to Matamoros

The light is dying in the cantina. The Captain drinks wine and stares at the flagstone floor.

“You got any food?”

“I got soup.”

“Ain’t you got meat?”

“I got quail.”

“Two quail.”

“I only got one.”

“One quail. Por favor”

The Mexican walked away. As he approached the kitchen door he turned

“Secession man?”

The Captain stared back. He did not blink.

“I’m trying to help. You got anywhere to go?”

The door was held open by an elbow and a leg as he waited.

“ Go to Matamoros. Ask for Ruby Madison”

“She running some charity.”

Oh how the man laughed at that.

The Captain ate. He stared into a blank and lonely world. He mounted his horse and rode away.

He rattled down an alley past rows of cages where the men held their bird markets. He slept that night on the hard earth beneath cottonwood trees. Bullfrogs croaked and he barely slept, and when he did he dreamed of lost friends and they all lay together in white baths of ice, and the ice hung around them in splinters so that they were surrounded by it and lay in shrouds of ice and there were separate particles of it in their hair. And this was death.

He crossed the Rio Grande and rode downriver on the Mexican side. He came to Matamoros and threaded his way down the parlous wharves through tea chests and hessian bags. A restless sea rolled to the rhythms of trade. A bar throbbed with stevedores and assorted rakehells. He entered and paid for some rancid aguardiente.

“I’m looking for Ruby Madison”

“This not her place”

“Some other place then”

“Casa de Contratación. Down the road apiece.”

“Contratación?”

“It’s a bar too”.

She was sitting in a captain’s chair and could have owned the place. She could look pretty and mean at the same time and leave a bit over for other things. He positioned himself next to her so that if she kicked out a leg they would make contact. No man stared so grimly at his drink but he knew she was looking at him. He wondered what she’d say. Instead she clicked her fingers over the bar and another glass of hooch was standing next to the first.

“Thank you ma’am.”

He had wanted her to speak first and he knew she knew that.

“Say that again”

“Thank you, ma’am”.

“Missoura. You’re a Missoura boy”.

He nodded and smiled slightly.

“Shelby man are you?”

“Yeah.”

“You carry yourself. Officer?”

He nodded again.

“I was one of his captains”

“Bon Kinsen?”

Now he looked at her full on.

“He told me about you. Had to leave you behind after Westport. You carry yourself but you look whupped at the same time.”

“I seen things”

“Haven’t we all”

“I feel like I’m in a bottomless pit. I thought I was dead. I dreamt of men with saws pushing poisons into my mouth”

“Sounds like sawbones with chloroform and bite board. They were trying to help you, boy.”

“Don’t call me boy.”.

“You can still get riled then. All part of being human.”

“You saying I’m not human.”

“Whoa! Easy!”

Women back in Liberty, Missouri hadn’t spoken to him like that. But he wasn’t ready to take her on.

“Come back to the spread. I’ll feed you, give you a bed for the night. That’s why you

came looking ain’t it”

“So you are Charity Ruby, helping out the soldiers.”

And she laughed at that. Just like the Mexican in the San Patricio cantina.

He was feeling just a mite better as he left the place with her. Until they were confronted outside by a band of ruffians, Lipan Indians, black fellows, tousled Mexicans, French deserters, a couple of Anglos. He felt she could handle herself and so could he, but the numbers weren’t stacking.

“Is he worth the robbing?”, asked the leader. “Then fill his open gut with stones and sink him”,

Theatrically expressed. Old pirates yes they rob I. They were all laughing. He turned to Ruby and saw just the trace, the suspicion of a smile.

“Tide’s out, Esteban. Nothing to sink into.”

She turned to Kinsen

“Get on your horse. Boy.”

Part III: From Matamoros to The Hacienda

They rode away from the sea. As another night fell they passed the dark shapeless forms of sleeping cattle. An old pile, built perhaps by some latter-day conquistador, loomed before them. The men were gradually riding away into the night and only the rump of her platoon remained.

Dinner was served by a Mexican girl. Dinner for three. Kinsen, Ruby and an older man.

“Captain Kinsen here is a Bushwhacker. Rode with Shelby. Reckon he thinks they might meet up again, ride back North and push those goddam Yankees back where they belong.”

“I never said any of that.”

She had a way of laughing at a man.

“You fight in the War?” he asked the older man to deflect attention.

“I’m not partial to war, Captain Kinsen. I’m a Judge. Way I see it most disputes have at least two sides to them”

“When they come knocking on your door even judges have to fight.”

“Didn’t do you much good”.

He swung round on her nettled by the barb.

“I got a job for you”, she said before he could take further action “Got some guns to be delivered to Maximilian. Then you can go looking for Shelby.”

The Judge intervened.

“Don’t you reckon Captain Kinsen might be a bit tired after all his experiences to go traipsing around Mexico at your beck.”

“You deal with your judging and let me sort out the bigger things.”

“That’s no way to talk to your father”

Now she swung on him.

“If you want to pay a visit to my father go out into the fields tomorrow and find the leaning cross stuck into the dry grass.

Part IV: From the Hacienda to Vera Cruz

He had no money and she promised plenty. So with Esteban and a troop of men they set forth one early morning. On their way they talked of many things, of the sea and the stars, of maps and birds, of guns and women. Esteban said that he would only fight for money and consort with a woman for love. Americans, he observed, seemed to favour the reverse. They travelled through lands where acacia and sotol and Spanish dagger grew. They rode through deserts of sublime architecture. They passed pedestals and spires, arches and windows carved from the rock by the wind that had found weakness within the strata that it worked into and turned ultimately to sand, which then turned traitor on its own and carved and scraped further at the wind’s beckon. A strange and melancholy land with sometimes scrags of maize and peons who avoided eye-contact.

They rode on, shadows on the rim of the world. Days riding, nights drinking. Another town, another cantina. Some show is being performed, some hellish patois burlesque. Aguardiente and the calico embraces of the whores. The next day they ride through the lignite country to Durango. Suddenly there is an alarum, and riders descend on them from a scarp, and a disorderly engagement ensues. Their attackers slither downwards compelled by gravity and horseflesh into proximation with the Captain, which proves fatal to several. But surprise and number prevail, and the Captain and Esteban are the last survivors and there are five of their assailants yet quick. Then Esteban too is shot. The captain dives from his horse and takes Esteban to the cover of some rocks and thorn and tends him. Both know he is dying.

“Go for I am done for.”

“I ain’t leaving you, friend.”

He looks about him. The five are watching them, unsure of further strategy. The Captain waits. He feels their rustlings across the trace, senses their agitation, and waits. Then one comes into view. He needs a conclusion. The Captain loads his carbine and balances it. He squeezes the trigger. The man is blasted back into his companions. They are all apparent now, dishevelled with shock, and four of them are alive. The Captain discards his carbine and rushes forward with pistols working. This terminates the careers of three more, but one scampers away, not as a retreating soldier might but like a whimpering animal of the ungulate kind. The Captain is not disposed to leave matters thus unresolved and gives pursuit and catches the man who is in truth a boy and takes him by the hair which is lank and slippery. The Captain’s wild bearded countenance must seem diabolic.

“Please, senor, they made me fight. They took me from my village.”

But the Captain’s membrane has thinned sufficient only to allow the viler attributes of his character to pass. He has out his Bowie knife and is intent on decapitation and is careless of the order of things so omits to kill the boy first in preparation therefor. At last the boy is dead, and a little longer off will be the moment of final separation of head and torso, and the Captain, bloodied and panting, will return to the dying Esteban with the head as trophy. Esteban is beyond expression and almost beyond utterance.

“May you know peace, brother.”

There will be no further comment on the situation The Captain prepares one grave and rides on. He cannot take the guns with him.

He has now fought in three wars. The first one, the one that gave Missourans a head start as they and Free State Kansans swapped atrocities, took over the late 1850s. This was followed by The War Between The States itself and now he had partaken in the Mexican equivalent between the intruding French and the Mexican liberales. It was time to go home so he made to the great port of Vera Cruz. He rides his way down an impenetrable curtain wall, and only as he eventually turns the corner does he see it for what it is, a convent for Discalced Carmelites. Beyond the convent the land slopes down to the Gulf and there are carts and benches around a grass patch, and dealers selling antiques.

“Old doubloons for a conquistador”, one shouts to Kinsen who ignores him.

After a pause the man shook what he said was an astrolabe, centuries old, to measure the stars. Instead Kinsen bought a coffee and sat on a bench. He had been there some while before he realised he knew the man at the end.

The Judge barely looked up as Kinsen sat down opposite him. He looked tired. He looked finished.

“Judge.”

“Captain Kinsen”

“What are you doing here?”

“They seized the hacienda”

“Yankees?”

“Jayhawkers, carpetbagging into Mexico. Old Jennison men I believe.”

“Jennison!” said Kinsen, and awful memories fought within him of the first civil war. The first of three.

“Judge, tell me how can you not fight?”

“You know, Captain, people don’t always fight for causes. Many, maybe most, fight for their tribe, the people around them, the people they grew up with. It’s easier and it’s safer. I have no tribe. I was a Judge condemned to stand apart from others. Or did I become a judge because I already stood apart? There is humanity to which we all belong, and its troubles we share, though often in grossly unfair proportions. And there are individuals. I see no other groupings in between.”

“That ain’t an easy way to live.”

The Captain was struggling. He remembered words out of time “They took me from my village”. And he remembered knives. Big Bowie knives. He needed to change the subject.

“And Ruby. Where is Ruby?”

“She was gone before they came. Maybe she got caught up in Maximilian’s demise.”

There was silence between them.

“I’m going back”

“Back?”

“Home”

“Home?”

“Missoura, or maybe just Texas. You coming?”

The Judge shook his head.

“I wish you well, Judge”.

Kinsen rode down to the quay. The convent was behind him now, and a solitary nun loitered outside the wooden gates. At the quay below there was a sign full of destinations. NEW ORLEANS, INDIANOLA, HAVANA, CAYENNE, JAMAICA

Sold I to the merchant ships

Minutes after they took I

From the bottomless pits.

They were behind him. Three men with beards and guns. Press gang, bounty hunters, Lord knows. There was nothing good for him in them. Colt 44s and a length of rope. And they had the drop on him. Tribes. His were gone from him, the pistolmen whose postbellum banditry would last way into the next century. John Thrailkill was somewhere between Jo Shelby and Porfirio Diaz, new spoils from a broken land. Ben Thompson, whom he had encountered on his ride there, had no guerillas left to lead into battles. Maximilian had been shot on the Hill of Bells with a general on each side of him like the robbers at the Crucifixion. Bonnie and Clyde were still a dream. Or were…These were Jennison men perverting the Monroe Doctrine to fit themselves.

Then behind them came the metallic scratch of a bigger gun. They turned too late. Two were taken out by the gunslinger. Kinsen helped himself to the third, distracted as he was.

“Thanks”.

It had all happened so fast. Back behind them the convent gates were shut. The nun had moved on, moved down towards the ships.

“Mighty sharp shooting for a conventual”.

She slung off the hood.

“Ruby Madison!”

Most of her followers had been blown away as Escobedo’s troopers took Maximilian and his generals at Queretaro. She had watched the execution and then helped herself to the safest clothes in town that even masonic and atheist Juaristas would draw a line at violating. (“I didn’t kill her”). There on the way out of town she too had met Ben Thompson.

“I’m going home”, he said.

“What happened to the guns?”

“What”

“The guns I gave you.”

“They’re on a mountain pass somewhere”.

“You know where. There’ll always be folk needing them”.

Could there have been a Bonnie and Clyde half a century earlier? Not for Ruby though. Bon Kinsen was about to rejoin the human race. But she did persuade him to go by land- too many pirates out on the Gulf.

Part V: Return to San Patricio

He remembers the route, They cross the Rio Bravo and head for San Patricio. Kinsen stops and snaps a long branch from a cottonwood. With his knife he whittles its end till…

“Like the beak of a bird” said Ruby

They come to the bird market and Kinsen hooks his pole into the top of a cage. It comes off and a small yellow bird flies away. The birdmen protest but there is another scratch of a gun. Ruby sits astride her horse and they know she can use it. One by one Kinsen empties every cage. Peckers and poorwills and finches take flight. At the end of the alley there is a bigger cage and a macaw inside draped in colours no man could ever reproduce. Kinsen coaxes it.

“The price of freedom”, Ruby says to the bird vendors.

The sky above them is full. And on the corner of the last street in San Patricio there is a mariachi trumpeter playing a song both sad and distantly triumphant like a feeling far away but coming closer and gaining confidence as it does. A song that recognises complexity and difference, that seems to be from another time and place and is in itself an invitation to return there.