BY AVELLINA BALESTRI

“The peace which from solitude flows, henceforth shall be Banastre’s theme.” – Banastre Tarleton, in a poem to his future wife Susan Bertie

~

“He turned him sated from the world’s renown to die the humble soldier of his Lord and change earth’s laurel for a heavenly crown.” – Susan Bertie about her husband, after his death

***

Enter the villain

Which every tale must have,

The handsome devil

With a skull on his helmet,

Spurring his horse bloody,

Wearing his saber dull.

Clank, clank, clank

The clash of metal rings merrily,

A deadly dancing tune,

As Washington and Tarleton

Duel for all eternity

In our engraved storybooks

There he is, 

The boy with the dark plume

Rivaled by darker eyes,

Wearing a jacket, wilderness green,

And white leather breeches,

His boot upon the cannon

In a conquering pose.

The daring dragoon rides out,

Terrible and tantalizing,

His tar-soaked torch ablaze,

Ordained to scorch the earth

And scour the swamps.

The women with whom he’s lain

And the men whom he has slain

Flow from his brash lips

Like punch flows from the bowl.

His sins are his outward solace

And inward insecurity.

The slaughter of Waxhaws stains him,

Tumbled down from his mount,

Wallowing in the mire,

While his Tories sally forth

To avenge their leader’s fall

And their own erasure.

The drubbing at Cowpens drains him

Of his energetic drive,

A lightning strike in the night 

Followed by the thunder of hooves

And the scarlet storm

Which will flood an empire

And drown her children.

The calvary is cut to pieces,

And the Highlanders lie in heaps.

Cornwallis will lean upon his sword

As Tarleton describes his defeat,

And his fury snaps the steel,

Seeing, at once, the end to come.

Yet Tarleton survives,

The villain who never dies,

However many times

We pretend to kill him.

He’ll breathe through a reed

And swim to the far shore

To fight another day.

He haunts and harasses us,

The chip still on his shoulder,

The gleam still in his eyes.

He is too young to know

What he cannot do,

And too proud to know

That he cannot win,

Not this time

With the world turning 

Upside-down.

He will turn it right-side-up again;

He is sure of it.

Perhaps we hope for it.

We are attracted and repulsed

By his self-assurance,

And by our own fantasies

Beyond the common flaws

Of a mortal man

Who is our brother,

The angel and the demon

Warring on within us all.

Clank, clank, clank,

Tarleton versus Tarleton,

From cradle to grave.

He tangles with Wilberforce,

Decrying abolition

In the name of Liverpool’s pounds,

Turning a blind eye 

To the scourge of black blood

And plugging his ears

To the sound of African names.

With missing fingers,

He brandishes his hand

To prove his wartime sacrifice

For Church and State,

The double standard

Of the old-school Englishman,

Waved for good or ill.

But he is not all that he seems,

Or at least not so

To the suffering poor

Who knew him as their benefactor,

Or the rape victims

For whom he sent a physician,

Or his scattered legion

Who loved him unto death,

Or to his dear Susan

For whom he settled down,

Sheathing his saber

And eating from her plate.

A pious lady,

Paying off his dice debts,

She was not his brand,

Yet he promised to try

Against the odds, to be worthy,

And she saw that he did.

He sketched her pastoral scenes

And wrote her sweet nothings,

To which she responded, poem for poem,

And in the end, when his burial came,

She had the last word:

A villain? Maybe so…

Or a hero, or a man

As mixed as you or I,

Buried under the Cross of Christ,

Made humble before his Lord,

Awaiting mercy’s wreath.