Cañon de Caballo
An Introductory Preview of My Literary Western: Blood Touching Blood
Violence begets violence as surely as a jackass begets a jackass, a bitch begets a litter of bitches, and a fool begets more folly.
Doctor Elijah Andersen
In this special edition of Y’allogy I tease a preview of the introduction to my literary western: Blood Touching Blood, which releases on December 1, 2024. Other special editions of the newsletter announcing the novel will include the cover reveal, additional previews of chapters, and an offer for autograph copies for paid subscribers.
Listen. The man breathes—shallow and swift. In the darkness he fumbles for a match. He strikes it, illuminating his gray-stubbled face in its prosperous glow, and enflames the kerosene wick. His room lightens—a dingy yellow-white. Shadowed silhouettes—his and the things of his—dance along the walls with each flicker of the flame. The night is warm and windless, coalblack and star speckled. He slumps at his desk exhausted in sweated long johns and woolen feet. Finding his pipe, he stuffs it, fires it, and puffs it in hopes of quelling his mind of phantom savages with their skinning knives and scalping blades, of dogwood switches falling from nowhere and everywhere—and all at once—whistling and whining in the windless air. Stone- and iron-tipped shafts nip at the heels and hocks, hands and heads of men and horses. They bite with the dullness of a thud and the sharpness of a tooth. Screams and moans echo the stone strewn walls. Phantom troopers horsed and unhorsed appear and disappear in the ghostly light of the desert morning. The wail of one silences all as specters fall on him as carrion upon a corpse. They prey upon his writhing being as dermestids on the dead. As wolves to raw meat they rip and tear, their mouths red with gore. They lap black blood with their slim tongues and belch human flesh, their bellies full to bursting. Then he was no more.
Gagging and sweated from topknot to toe the man woke. His breathing swift and shallow. His tongue bleeding where he gnawed his own flesh. He drew on his pipe. Hot smoke singed the wound. He drew again. Smoke curled about his head and haloed in the light of the lamp before dissolving into the darkness of that dismal night. He scratched an itch on his knee from something that bit or poked or stung him in the morning of that day. In the hellish West Texas desert something was always biting, poking, or stinging. He glanced again at the scrap of paper Corporal Chevalier delivered that morning. It bore the hand of Doctor Andersen. The Colonel had no time to read it at the time. His day was spent presiding over the burial of Sergeant Taylor, drafting a report for the War Department of the previous day’s engagement with Victorio and his Chihennes Apaches, and composing a letter of condolence to the Sergeant’s family.
With the day spent he retreated to his quarters where he nibbled at his meal and read the Doctor’s note. It troubled him, as did the day’s and the previous day’s events. He penned his thoughts into a journal and eyed over passages from the Bible. He laid on his cot craving rest he knew would not come—and woke with a heave in sweatsoaked long johns. He felt hollow-souled.
At his desk, he worked the tobacco with his penknife and an empty cartridge and sucked in the smoke. He scanned the Doctor’s message again.
It’s a universal truth, as true as the fact that birds fly in the air and fish swim in the water, that acts of extreme cruelty are met in kind or with means crueler still by an enemy given already to dehumanizing cruelty. To put it crudely: Violence begets violence as surely as a jackass begets a jackass, a bitch begets a litter of bitches, and a fool begets more folly. It’s the devil’s own business. If you persist in it, you’re a damn fool, Ethan Pendleton.
He placed the smoldering pipe on the desk and reached for the lemons in the wooden bowl beside his half-eaten supper. He bit into the sour fruit and ate what he bit—rind and all. Putting the lemon down he took up his pipe and puffed, tracing the words damn fool through the lingering haze. He stared into his dark lit room, pipe in hand. He sat he knew not how long, long enough for his sweated long johns to dry. Doctor Andersen might well be right. His command damned, his pursuit foolish. His life accused, no better than the former lives of the men under his command—men who were hewers of wood and drawers of water. He put his pipe down and took up his lemon and gnawed it, then put what remained on the desk. He licked the sticky from his fingers and wiped his hand down his leg. He then opened his journal and with the nib of his pen scratched across the pulpy paper:
I won’t change. I can’t. If I could wish away violence and vengeance I would. But such wishes are foolish. Even peacemakers are roused to rage when the innocent and lovely are slaughtered. I know better than most that violence can cloud the heart and mind like a billow. I also know it can be sweeter to the soul than slow dripping honey if it rights wrongs. I wasn’t the one who did the devil’s business in Cãnon de Caballo. I wasn’t the one who flayed the soles of Sergeant Taylor’s feet as he lay screaming. I wasn’t the one who gagged his cries with his own bloody manhood. Victorio’s warriors did that. No, I’ll not change. My life was lost to me long ago and I’ll mete out whatever punishment I see fit, even if it is mere folly and leads to more violence. The devil be damned—and me along with him.
He stood and forced his feet into his boots and picked up his pipe. It had winked out. He scraped the spent tobacco onto the floor and filled it again from the pouch and fired it. He walked out into the yard and peered into the predawn night, trying to identify constellations among the manifold stars and planets that crowded the West Texas sky. The stars in his boyhood home of Virginia were the same, but the sky was different—opaque, milky. Distant stars remained shrouded in a blanket of blackness. Identifying constellations was easy. But in the deep, dark nights of the Texas desert each star shone bright and clear—a cacophony of light. He stood puffing his pipe, looking into the night, tracing imaginary lines among the windswept jewels of God and connecting the dots until he sketched Ursa Major and Minor, Scorpius and Sagittarius.
Or so he thought. . . .
Derrick G. Jeter, Blood Touching Blood (McKinney: Y’allogyPress, 2024), 1–4.
Texan spoken here, y’all.
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Gonna be good.
More, more, more … can’t wait!