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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 ski
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.)
5. (Notes for an Unfinished Narrative)
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.