The Glorious Recollections of an Inglorious Time

[Jackson]

January, 1832
See the child. He is dark of flesh and thin, he wears a loose and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves, his folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster and trapper of beasts. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy hunkers by the fire and studies him. The mother, a Lakota squaw, dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, browned by the sun and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape.

[Jackson]

March, 1833
He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands, and his shoulders are broad and strong. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.

April, 1833
On a certain night a drunken boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol for words harshly exchanged. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After a while he slumps down the face of the bar and sits in the grimy floor. Both bullets are kept still when the boy becomes a man. He lies on a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas.

[Jackson]

May, 1833
He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone. He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and asylum. He sees a fellow hanged in a crossroads hamlet and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he thenceforth hangs dead from a rope while urine darkens his trousers. He works in a sawmill, as'well as in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and thirty four he rides into a small cattle town.

[Gathero]

looking for more gunny

[Jackson]

April, 1834
The boy came upon the small town in the evening of the fourteenth day of April, he sat the tattered mule upon a low rise and looked down at the town, the quiet adobe houses, the line of green oaks, willow and cottonwoods that marked the course of the river, the plaza filled with wagons with their tattered covers and the whitewashed public buildings as well as a Moorish churchdome rising from the pristine copse of trees. A light breeze stirred the fronds of his hat, his matted greasy hair stunk as an animal does, strangely untouched blue eyes lay dark and tunneled in a caved and haunted face while a foul stench rose from the wells of his rotting boot tops. The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end. The young fellow went down a narrow sandy road and as he went he met a deadcart bound out with a load of corpses, a small bell tolling the way and a lantern swinging from the gate. Three men sat on the box not unlike the dead themselves or spirit folk so white and pale they were with lime and nearly luminescent in the dusk. A pair of ragged horses drew the cart and they went on up the road in a faint cloud of upset dust, the boy turned and watched them go with little more than a casual glance of interest. The naked feet of the dead jostled stiffly from side to side as he rode away and into the town's heart.

[Jackson]

April, 1834
The young wanderer went on through the town leading the animal, there were none about the empty, sand-filled streets. By and by he entered a plaza and he could hear guitars and a horn. At the far end of the square there were lights from a cafe and laughter and highpitched cries. He led the mule into the square and up the far side past a long portico toward the lights, there was a team of dancers in the street and they wore gaudy costumes and called out in Spanish words that were unfamiliar to him. He and the mule stood at the edge of the lights and watched. Old men sat along the tavern wall and children played in the dust. They wore strange costumes all, the men in dark flatcrowned hats, white nightshirts, trousers that buttoned up the outside leg and the girls with garish painted faces and tortoiseshell combs in their blueblack hair. The kid crossed the street with the mule and tied it and entered the cafe. A number of men were standing at the bar and they quit talking when he entered. He crossed the polished clay floor past a sleeping dog that opened one eye and looked at him and then he stood at the bar and placed both hands on the grimey tiles. The barman nodded to him. "Digame." he said. "I ain't got no money but I need a drink. I'll fetch out the slops or mop the floor 'er whatever calls fer it." The kid would reply shortly afterwards, though the tavernkeeper would only shrug his shoulders in response to the boy's words before returning back to polishing a miniscule corner of the bartop. Not but a moment or so later, the boy would attempt again to get his point across, scarred brow raised in mild irritation as he roughly spoke, "You speak American?" Which when said the grizzled bartender would only stare at him with a vague look of contempt. The kid proceeds to perform sweeping motions with his hands in accordance to the situation, the barman laughs at him for but a moment before shrugging once more and fetching the broom. Such is taken and the distinctly unidentified boy moves on to the back of the room, the establishment was a great hall of a place, and he'd sweep in the corners where potted trees stood silent, around the large sleeping dog, and along the row of stools in front of the bar where drunken folks congregated in droves. As he neared finishing sweeping the vast room with it's dusty floors, numerous spitoons and many a table where men sat playing cards; the dancers had since departed, as had the music and many of the tavern's patrons. He'd tap the broom on the steps to clear it of dust before returning it to it's proper place beside the door, then he came to stand before the bar where he'd casually study the tavernkeeper. The barman would seem to ignore him, so the boy rapped with his knuckles upon the counter top, the barman turned and put one hand on his hip and pursed his lips in accordance. "How 'bout that drink now?" said the kid. The man stood without so much as a look of minute recollection and so the kid made the drinking motions once more and the barman flapped his towel idly at him. "Andale." he'd grumble in Spanish before making a shooing motion with the back of his hand.

[Jackson]

The kid's face clouded. "You son of a bitch." he said. He started down the bar with a furious swagger to his otherwise light step. The barman's expression did not change. He swiftly brought up from under the bar an oldfashioned military pistol with a flint lock and shoved back the hammer with the heel of his hand. A great mechanical clicking in the tense silence. A clink of glasses all down the bar as men started to depart with their own best interests in mind. Then the scuffling of chairs pushed back by the players at the wall as they resigned from their game of cards and hustled out the door. The boy watched the barman's eyes for whatever he might glean from them. The man waved the pistol toward the door, the blood draining from his face in honest consideration of the situation's severity, not long after he'd come around the end of the bar and place the pistol upon the counter; a heavy knotted club within grasp as he labours towards the kid like a man out to do some chore. He swung twice at the kid and twice the boy stepped to the right then he stepped backward some. The barman froze awkwardly as the kid boosted himself lightly over the bar and picked up the pistol. No one moved. He raked the frizzen open against the bartop and dumped the priming out and laid the pistol down again upon the counter. Then he selected a pair of full bottles from the shelves behind him and came around the end of the bar with one in each hand. The barman stood in the center of the room, he was breathing heavily and he turned, following the kid's deliberate movements. When the boy approached him he raised the wooden club. Jackson crouched lightly with the bottles and feinted and then broke the right one over the man's head. Blood and liquor bubbled and sprayed as the man's knees buckled and his eyes rolled. The kid had already let go of the bottleneck and he pitched the second bottle into his right hand in a roadagent's pass before it even reached the floor, he then backhanded the second bottle across the barman's skull and crammed the jagged remnant of a bottleneck into his eyesocket as he went down with a torrent of blood flowing from his eviscerated scalp and eye. The kid vaulted the bar and took another bottle and tucked it under his arm and walked out the door. The dog was gone. The men in the tavern watched with awed features and alarmed stares as the young fellow departed. He untied the mule and led it across the square, he'd spend not a single night in that town before passing along the road once more.

[Jackson]

City of Chihuahua, Mexico, March 1836

The air is fetid and sour, the drifter occupies a corner of the cramped dungeon, nothing more than a sparse collection of hay ridden with all manner of insect, and the ragged clothes upon his back shelter him from the bite of the seemingly perpetually cold stones beneath him; not even the heat of over a dozen men in those cramped conditions could alleviate that cold. Though the man is drown in utter darkness, he knows the multitude of similarly imprisoned compatriots is great, for the sounds of their breath, more often wheezing and sputtering than not filled the room with a decrepit sense of life. He has been contained there, within that prison for four nights and three days, in all that time no food, water or restitution was offered by their captors; and the many men pissed and shat into a vast hole within the centre of the room when the need took them. The reeking rabble of that dungeon sit about in squalor, picking scabs and insects from their filthy hair and hides, some eating them straightaway, never once did the man sleep, kept awake by distrust and the shuffling of human bodies. When daylight finally breaks, not but a minuscule javelin of light pierces through the single ventilation shaft within their hole, men fight viciously for this meagre shaft of light, lest some forget the sun's touch within their world of darkness. Some hours later the thumping of bootheels is audible within the stone-lined hall beyond the enormous wooden door, the squeal of a rusty latch being drawn pervades all men's thoughts as they each drift off into silence whilst the door is opened; two men enter, one hefting a great bucket of slop water which he'd set just beyond the door, the other bears a rusty escopeta which he brandishes at the prisoners with evident glee, a single prisoner reaches for the water prematurely and just as swiftly is shot down by the soldier, his guts spilling from his back as the heavy ball tears through his abdomen. Just as suddenly as they came, they were gone from that place, leaving little more than a trace of footsteps upon the distant air, the groans of a slowly dying man, and some water by which all the men must share. Surely things could not get any worse.

[Jackson]

Cantina at the outskirts of Chihuahua, four nights previous

The man, though young, is a veteran of many battles, the scars of his flesh pallid and numerous, he lounges upon a dusty old crate in a shadowed corner of the room that passed for seating in that gloomy hacienda-style saloon; he grunts a breath, uneasily inhaling the smoke filled air within the single room establishment. A bottle of some foul liquor known to the locals as mezcal resides upon the poorly constructed, soon to be rotten table before him, he uncorks the bottle and raises it to his lips; grimacing some as the thickly alcoholic stench ascends to his nostrils, he'd shudder some as he takes a lengthy draught from the contents. The cantina about him is nearly without patrons, steely gaze rising from the tabletop to casually scan the inhabitants of said-room, a small gang of vaqueros occupy a dimly illuminated corner of the room, they speak in a tongue only vaguely familiar to the man and he knows not their words. An old fellow sits at the bar opposite it's Mexican tender, another of the few Americans to have travelled this far south, the young man hears him discussing something and comes to learn the fellow is from Georgia and is called by the name of Sydney; he is a former loyalist of the Revolutionary War, he speaks of the degradation of American society through a lack of contact with European founders, he says they are little better than the savages whose land we so fortuitously stole in the first place. As Sydney rants and raves, heavy in drink, it becomes evident to the young man as to why the old sonuvabitch was run out of nearly every state he sought to settle in. The door squeaks ajar as another man enters the cantina, an American so tall and emaciated he greatly resembled a scarecrow, as the newcomer stepped into the candlelight his features could be distinguished, he is exceptionally pale of skin with lank black hair knotted into an assortment of grease-thick locks which dangled about his shoulders and were just barely contained beneath a ratty wide-brimmed hat crusted with mud and debris. The skeletal man stares at Sydney's back with a fiercely malicious gaze, allowing the young vagabond a lengthy glance at his mutilated face, such was scarred by branding the letters H and T upon his forehead; and it wasn't long before Jackson would notice the fellow's ears were removed and the flesh of such long ago shaved to the bone. He knew the cause of such grievous injuries to be punishment for horse thievery in the state of Kentucky, and he couldn't help but allow a sneer to peak at the corner of chapped lips. As swiftly as a lion stalking game, the scarecrow of a man lunges forward with resolute purpose, spider-like fingers reaching for the thinning hair upon Sydney's head, whereupon he'd give a fierce tug; ripping a clump of the old man's scalp and sending him careening backwards into the floor. The bartender's eyes widen some in stunned awe as he yells something, surprisingly in English, "Ain't ye a sour cunt this evenin', Toadvine! Ol' Sydney ain't done shit but run his mouth all Christ-damned day." The other inhabitants of the saloon seem only vaguely interested in the tussle before they return to their respective drinks, though Jackson keeps a cautious eye upon the melee lest it spread amongst men as things of that sort often do. (To Be Continued)