The Fetterman Massacre...

The farm—all two hundred acres of prime cotton land from the time when that much could support the self-delusion of “squire”—is still there. It seems suspended in time and desert quiet (as was once all of southern Texas), remote, where during planting season, a static plume of listless dust follows a lone tractor as it plows and sows into what once yielded, and still only reluctantly will yield little more than huisáche and mesquite. Water has to be piped in from the Rio Grande thirty miles away to soften this hard land into giving up something other than catclaw and quelíte. J.D. Fetterman bought it from a failed rancher as a parcel, out of which came out the bits and pieces that J.D. sold and gave away, and which became Curry, three churches, and the Curry graveyard. The fields, bordered by deep-rooted woods on the east, and distance and the loneliness of Echo to the north, zig-zag their way west around the upper edges of Curry. From their center, you can almost read the burg’s history like the strata on cliff rock laid bare by wind and sand.

A month after J.D. moved his family—his wife Consuélo, two boys and two girls—into the new colonial (revived) home, he buried them in the Curry cemetery, all dead of cholera after a week’s visit to Consuelo’s relatives in Matamóros.They were buried in a plot fifty yards away from the space where Wilhelmíno Cruz’s mother, his only brother, his two oldest and one younger son, along with a stillborn baby girl and a baby boy were already buried. J.D. had a place reserved for himself beside his beloved wife. Will didn’t need a reservation, since at the time, his family were the only Mexicans buried in the Curry cemetery in a space demarcated by two wide roads: one used for maintence vehicles and the other for the hearse. Other Mexicans, with overweening pride, had themselves carted off, or were carted off, to the graveyard at Las Múlas, where schoolboys with shotguns and .22s weren’t allowed to mistake Mexican headstones for rabbits, or the townspeople to bury their horses and their dogs, when they buried them at all.

Will, his three oldest sons and his brother Omár, cleared the land with mule and harness for J.D. They started shortly after the turn of the century and had half of it done by the start of the first war. At the end of it, J.D. was rich from the war’s demand for cotton and living alone in his mansion; and Will had one less son who would never come home from France. The rest of his family died off at a rate no less than expected for Mexicans with their congenitally weak lungs, and an intrinsic rate of inability to rise above their station.

Will himself thought that except for a Mexican’s share of bad luck, he had it good. He had built the house he was living in, not much bigger than the shacks he had built for the rest of the hired help but with tar paper over the plank walls. He raised his own vegetables, livestock for meat and pork, and chickens. His wife and daughters helped feed the help, both seasonal and permanent, for a few pennies

One of the men, a fellow named Daniél Fernández, lived with his wife in one of the shacks, but when his wife, who helped in the housekeeping for J.D., started having children, they moved to a good house inside Curry. After Daniel’s third child was born, he was made foreman, a position that most had conceded to Will, but which he had never been formally installed with. Sometime after the birth of Daniel’s fourth child, J.D. became very ill and moved back east with a sister, and Daniel moved his family into the Fetterman estate.

J.D. didn’t survive to see the end of the second war. Nether did two of Will’s boys. One never made it out of the South Pacific, nor the other out of Italy.

A week after J.D.’s burial at the Curry cemetery, Daniel billed Will for rent. One hour after that, Will began moving his family into a cheap house on the outskirts of Curry that had once housed the appurtenances of maintenance for the Southern Pacific. The last birth in relation to the life of Will Cruz on Fetterman land was a kid, which Will delivered himself and carried in his arms into Curry with the dam walking beside him.

In later years some men accused Will of spite and envy for refusing to help Daniel out before he slid the business toward bankruptcy. Some even hinted at Will’s ingratitude towards J.D. for letting J.D.’s family down. They thought that Daniel had been running the business for the sister back east who didn’t know anymore about farming than Daniel did, and maybe even that the blue-eyed fair-haired traits of Daniel’s children which had drawn sly snickers through the years were just ironically coincidental with J.D.’s own. J.D.’s sister died a week before the farm went into receivership, and the last of J.D.’s fortune and hers were divided among the five Fernandez boys in trust with Daniel’s wife. It was enough to keep them until one of them grew up and developed the skills to run the farm.

Will would only say, “Pride is as useful as your eyes and ears are.”

One day he began work on a wooden frame five feet from the shack his family was living in. It was after the war, and by then the four girls were working as housekeepers throughout Curry, and his sons were pumping gas, and working in the fields just as he was. It’s hard to tell what he ran out of first: money, strength, or desire. He managed to get tar paper around the front and both sides of the house that had begun to take shape. The back could wait on another generation.

He said, “It is good to be first in some things. I will haunt this house before anybody else will,” and one hour after he had hammered in the last nail, he went inside his own house and laid down and died.

Noe.

New Meaning to the Term "Pumping up"...

Note:
Neither cultural critique, nor out and out political comment is the function of this blog. Just writing is-about people: the children of the lesser... well, you know. But writing is a time-driven avocation, and shortages of it are never rare. I don't want this blog to suffer because of it. I'd like to write a story a month, but I'm very late now. That's why I'm entering today's page from my daily log, if you'll pardon my pun...well, you'll see that, too. It ain't art, but well, Dear Diary...

June 4, 2010

Some guy in England, uncharacteristically, went on a rampage and shot and killed at least twelve people and wounded twenty some others. If I’m hazy with the statistics, it’s maybe because that sort of event has become so common, I might be becoming (like everybody else) desensitized into a “What else is new?” disposition. This kind of thing doesn’t happen often in England, a practically gunless nation, but the total saturation with violence, the real and the invented kind, by every kind of medium, has infected very corner of the world. In this country, where everyone might as well be issued a gun and some ammo when he’s born, a happening like this just stirs up a chicken or the egg kind of debate over the right to bear arms: Would more guns have prevented a tragedy that was committed with a gun, or would no guns lessen the incidence of death by firearms (as they actually do in England)? The latter would seem to be a “Duh!” kind of perspective, but the gun fanciers in this country (not in the least, the NRA) have made it their mission in life to keep the people properly constitutional, armed, and suspicious of everybody. The difference between the almost thirty thousand deaths by gunfire in this country and the handful in England per year, is a value which the NRA is not morally nor intellectually capable of gauging.

Where once, the most common element of a psycho’s profile, was “knife as penis”, violence now is as common to even casual relationships as roses are. Rape is the newest technigue in sex. There’s very little stigma to anything anymore. Viagra, organ enlargers, sex jelly, and all kinds of enhancers for copulation are hawked openly on TV. They can put a gizmo in your penis so that you can pump yourself up an erection, It’s as respectable as plastic surgery, or a knee replacement.

But you can always join the NRA where they replace everybody’s dick with a gun—including the women’s.

Noe.

The Last to See Them Alive

The planet keeps oxygen in balance so that living things can breathe It without choking, so that air won’t catch on fire and kill us all when lightning crackles through it—or somebody strikes a match against a NO SMOKING sign, or we test an atom bomb. Water keeps recycling itself so that it stays fit to drink. And every now and then, the world reluctantly gives us someone like Victor as an antitoxin to the worst in all of us, so that we can build up a resistance against epidemic malevolence.

Victor was raised on a farm where his father, Greyson Mills, put a couple of hundred acres or so into corn or soy beans, tomatoes or sugar beets, and sometimes two or three, or all four of them. Grey had once raised some livestock, but he developed issues with the slaughtering part of it, and gave it up, except for a couple of milk cows. He kept ten or so acres in woods which he would selectively thin out for the mahagony that furniture makers and such, would solicit him to sell. Grey kept it as a refuge for wildlife.

When Victor started school, only one sister of the three to whom he was sole brother remained at home, the other younger two, Jane and Martha, dead of childhood cancers at ages six—and six. But Ann went on to junior high leaving Victor to defend himself from the third grade on where bullying him had become a rite of passage for the other boys (and some girls) his age who had been taught that violence was a necessary element of the trek towards adulthood. Because Victor had been strictly forbidden to fight by his parents, who were aided by selected biblical passages read by Grey—and smiling, nodding assent by Naomi Mills, who was tiny, and looked every bit as cute and as gentle as a ladybug. Grey used to tell Victor that he’d never been in a fight—and it seemed likely that he’d never be, because he was six foot four and weighed two hundred fifty pounds of work-toughened flesh and bone. But Victor favored his mother.

He endured the constant provocations of his schoolmates through the rest of elementary school; and on through the eight grade where his reputation—or lack of it—had preceded him. In the ninth grade, he went out for freshman sports with the reluctant consent of his parents, and he threw himself into baseball, football, basketball and track with such fierceness that he inspired no little measure of respect, and it freed him finally from his constant torment. But there would still occasion incidents where his contemporaries would demonstrate—to those unfamiliar with Victor—the nature of his nonviolence, by slapping him and ordering him to “turn the other cheek.” But Victor would only smile and endure it.

He stayed happily busy by helping on the farm, tutoring less capable students, pitching in on the local lliteracy council, teaching a Sunday school class for pre-teens, fundraising for various groups, and delivering meals on wheels to senior folks during weekends

One summer day, while discussing his choice of colleges with his parents and Ann at the dinner table, three individuals in ski masks came in through the open front door and interrupted supper, with at least one gun pointed at the Mills, trying to extract the location of a cache of money from them, taking their time though, in a taunting way uncharacteristic of thieves in desperate need of loot. After asking everyone the questions that evoked no satisfactory answers, they slapped Victor in a very deliberate and obvious way on both cheeks. Then they slapped Naomi, and when Victor made a move to defend her, Grey gripped his arm with the strength of a vise and held him immobile. When the robbers saw this, they backed Grey into a corner and concentrated their interrogation of him by making fun of his non-aggressiveness, and by slapping him four times that resounded like gunshots. Then one of the three took hold of Ann from behind, letting his hands rove over her in a suggestive way. This time, Victor was held in place by the direct look of Grey into his eyes, and the talon-like hold of two small hands on his arms from behind. Because Naomi was a Mills by marriage, but an O’Bruin by birth.

Stepping to the front of Victor, she took a cast iron skillet—that her mother had passed on to her and that she kept inside a hand-knit cover on a lamp table in the living room—and applied it to the back of the head of one of Grey’s tormentors who collapsed like cut rope. When one other turned around in reaction, she swung the pan again and literally knock him off his feet. Grey took the third by the scruff of the neck and enclosed the hand holding the gun with a sizeable hand of his own and took him to the floor, breaking the thief’s nose in the process and at least three fingers, including the one on the trigger.

While Victor drove the pickup truck, Grey sat in the back with the three, stopping that many times with each one of them to walk him to the door where he held a brief discussion with the parent answering it. On the last stop, Grey waved to Victor, and Victor went up to join Grey,and took the gun with him, and he heard Grey say, “This is probably yours. If it isn’t, you might want to get rid of it. I didn’t want to hurt the boy, but it just happened. I’m sorry.” Grey never bothered to unmask the boys; he delivered them the same way that they came in through the front door, maybe a little better for wear.

Victor graduated from the state university as a veterinarian and joined the military, much against his family’s wishes, but he had to do his part. While he was away—showing Afghanis how to worm a camel, when he wasn’t tightening ligatures on young men’s butchered stumps to keep them from bleeding to death—Naomi got cancer, and after a year-long battle that left her with Frankenstein scars from each of her shoulders to her ribcage, hairless, and with not much left of her but the O’Bruin gleam in her eye, she died. Victor didn’t make it to the funeral—on Grey’s orders. A month later, Grey was found dead in his barn from one bullet in his back and three in his chest. The one in his back was the first one to hit him. A pail of milk was found beside him still full where he’d laid it down to face his attackers. The house was practically torn apart by ransackers. On Victor’s way home for this funeral, Ann, now teaching history of religion at a local branch of the state university, became the third victim of a psychotic senior who got mad at his mother because she wouldn’t buy him a BMW for his graduation.

Standing in as sole surviving family, two of the boys who had been authors of the first raid on the farm, stood by Victor’s side at the double funeral. One was a lawyer, the other still in medical school.

The minister overseeing the funeral declaimed, “It is a mournful day when we, the bereft, including a man of God like myself, must arm ourselves against the random nature of this plague of violence that threatens to deprive us all of our families,” and he whipped the tail of his coat back to show a pistol holstered at his waist.

On the way to the cars, the minister stopped Victor, and with an air of speechless condolence, slapped him lightly, on each side of the face with an open hand. Victor hauled off and knocked him down with a vicious right that broke the minister’s jaw and laid him flat.

That same afternoon, Lieutenant John Merit, the third boy in the first raid, took his John Browne off before he went up alone to the front door of the Mills farm to arrest Victor. On the way to town for the arraignment (which probably would not amount to much since the lieutenant’s father was the judge in common pleas), John said, “Why’d you do it, Victor?”

Victor said, “I don’t know. There was just something about that motherfucker I didn’t like.”

Noe.

…by the gate of Bathrabbim.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

All of us drink more than we should, but Uri, Jap’s friend, has a real problem, the way we define “problem” by the standards that each of us uses to justify his level of hedonism. Jap is a great admirer of Dr. Phield, and he thought that maybe Phield could talk to Uri to some effect, so he brought Uri to one of Fred’s gatherings about a year ago.

Phield told Jap, “I’m not a practicing therapist, Jap. Nor qualified to give anybody advice on something as deep-seated as alcoholism.”

Jap said, “Uri is in dark need of an alternator.”

In the kitchen with Fred and a couple of the other guys, including Jap, Phield said, “Over time, most alcoholics forget what it is that drove them to drink in the first place: the desired effect, as it were. But of little edification to somebody who has managed to stoke his common human weaknesses into an inextinguishable bag of self-loathing that he can only tolerate with more drink: a chicken or the egg kind of thing. The capacity to engage in riskier emotions is replaced by a a bottomless reservoir for self-indulgence.”

Jap said, “You can’t harpoon sympático for a fellow humanist, Dr. Phield?”

“Uri’s desire to quit is certainly a step in the right direction, Jap. But I’m not the right person to guide him any further.”

“A pinhead of elucidation can light a man’s way down the last mile.”

Phield was running a small insurance company now. It gave him plenty of time to think on the things that Phield liked to think about. He was putting together a techno-thriller for publication. But he made an appointment for Uri to come talk to him. He liked Jap, too.

Now Uri Phillips made his way here—and ultimately to Phield’s office—throught the twists and turns of labrynthine fate:

One night, Adele Kinderman, a junior at the university, attended a party across state lines in the Kentucky hills thrown by one of the fraternities already in Dutch with the dean for their wildness. She never totally passed out through the night, but she was only conscious enough to count to five when at least that many of the frats raped her. When she felt fully capable of driving, she got into her car, and maybe a mile later, or fifty, she couldn’t remember, she drove the car off a cliff.

Luther Phillips, seventy years old already, found her in a gulley the next morning while he was out hunting. He pulled her out of the car and took her to his house. He lived alone, separated by at least five miles from his closest neighbor. His first wife, who had wanted children, came home pregnant one day after eight barren years, and told him, “It hain’t y’orn,” and left him. His second one left after three; the child in her belly “tweren’t his’n neither”. A band of children, some of them his except for errant biology, would bedevil him every time he went to town, hollering things like, “Reptile dysfunction! Reptile dysfunction!”

Adele woke up after four days while he was sitting by her bed reading the bible, and she said, “How many times did you fuck me?” and he said, “I wouldn’ a dun that lessen ‘twere what it tooken ta save ya.”

She didn’t leave until two years later to go back to New York fo finish a teaching degree, and reconcile with her mom and dad. Luther and Uri (now Uri Phillips) attended her graduation with her immigrant parents, whose idea it had been to send her out to the heartland to find her American self. Adele went back to the little town in the hills to teach not only the children but some of the now awestruck women of the town whom she taught how to “han’write proper.”

When Uri was twelve, Luther had a stroke out in the woods and fell on top of Uri, dying and breaking Uri’s arm at the same time. It was at this time that Uri began to drink maybe not seriously, but occasionally heavier, already familiar in small increments with Luther’s famous squeezings. Adele decided right after his graduation from high school to relate to Uri the true circumstances of his birth. Thie wisdom of this decision is yet to be configured.

When Uri went to college, he met Tammy, who could drink as long and hard as he could, and they showed up married one spring break at Adele’s, who assumed a “qué será, será” pholosophy about it and took Tammy into the bigger city to get her into some kind of salon shape—and some moron ran them off the road at about the same place Adele had tried to commit suicide twenty years before. This time she didn’t make it. Neither did Tammy.

Two years later, Uri woke up at a motel in town with no memory of how he had gotten here, and the deed to a ranchhouse in one of the townships. Jap says Uri won it in a card game from a real estate agent. Uri certainly didn’t need any more capital. He was comfortably wrapped in a million or two of insurance money from Luther, Adele, and from Tammy, who Adele took to an insurance company just after the perm and manicure. Uri liked it here, and he found a great friend in Jap, so he stayed. That was six years ago:

Phield said, “Well Uri, I have to say that if anybody ever got driven to drink, it was you. In this instance, my question would be, ‘What will drive you to sobriety?’ Is there anything you have ever wanted to do that you have to be sober for?”

Uri said, “I used to want to play the banjo.”

Phield says, “Did you ever do it?

“No.”

“How long did you ever stay completely sober?”

“I get sober once in a while just long enough for my mind to feel the shame and the sickness, the remorse, and the guilt of breaking my promises to quit. I debate suicide. And then I start drinking again. But I stayed sober for two years once.”

“Well, goodness! Tell me about that time!”

This girl, Tammy (coincidentally), showed up at Uri’s front door one day with a kitten in her arms, asking if he might have some milk or something for it. It would have been difficult to decide which one of them was in worse shape: the kitten had a broken leg; Tammy had at least one social disease; Lily had feline leukemia—and neither one had a home. Uri took both of them to doctors. Tammy stayed a year. And bloomed. And left. Lily stayed with him and lived for two years.

Phield said, “How long after Tammy left did you start drinking again.”

Uri said, “Two years.”

“Wait a minute! When did you stop?”

“When she left.”

Phield told Jap on the phone, “Some men go through life looking for an answer to which there is no question. They’re driven to nihilism, even to fatality by an inability to accept that living isn’t all that complicated. The heart won’t stop beating just because you tell it to. The world would be a lonely place if that were so.”

About a week later, Phield showed up at Uri’s door with a kitten in his hands. Phield said, “She came to my back door looking like she needed help. I thought about how good you are at this sort of thing. Can you do something for her?”

A month later, Jap called Phield and asked him if they could have lunch. Uri came along. They all had the tilapia special. Jap had a glass of beer. Phield had a glass of white wine. And Uri drank ice tea. Phield asked Uri if he still had the cat, and Uri said, “Sharon’s doing fine. She’s going to live for a long time.” He himself was shuffling papers to try to get into veterinary school.

Waiting without speaking by the car while Uri took care of the bill that he insisted on paying, Jap looked at Phield almost lovingly for a moment, and said quietly, “Bravo, Maestro. Bravo.”

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

Noe.