On a warm forenoon of pale and cloudless sky they arrived at the Río Grande, known to the Mexicans as the Rio Bravo del Norte. Taylor’s scouts had reported that the town of Matamoros, positioned on the south bank of the river and about twenty-five miles inland from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, was fortified by a small Mexican garrison. The river along that stretch was eighty yards wide and the Mexicans had confiscated every boat to be found and taken them all to their side and posted sentinels for miles along the riverbank east and west of town.
After sending a detachment to secure Point Isabel on the Gulf as the landing point for his seaborne supplies, Taylor chose to give the Mexicans a show. He marched his troops upstream along the north bank and hove into view of Matamoros with regimental bands blaring and colors popping in the breeze. He halted the troops in a wide clearing and rode with his staff officers to the crest of a bluff affording an excellent view of the river in both directions and of Matamoros across the way. The river was the color of buckskin and its banks were lined with cattails except along the Matamoros riverfront and its opposite shore where the ferry had operated before the Mexicans dismantled it on learning of Taylor’s approach. There were hardwood stands upriver and down along both banks and cotton fields shone in the distance on the Mexican side.
A crowd of townspeople had assembled on the Matamoros bank to gape at the Americans. In the midst of them was a troop of lancers sitting their handsome mounts and resplendent in green tunics with crimson sashes and tall black shakos with horsehair plumes. Alongside them an army band played rousing patriotic tunes hard and loud in competition with the strains of the Yankee musicians. Commanding the lancers was a major who now stood in the stirrups and brandished his saber at the invaders and addressed them loudly and at length in eloquent Spanish which Taylor’s interpreter translated as a directive to the Yankees to go home or die.
As soon as the major had done with his address, the crowd started in with cursing and shaking their fists and the boys among them threw stones which all fell short in the water. The Americans in the ranks swore back at the Mexicans in explicitly profane terms. The cacophony of martial music and bilingual damnations shook the skies while Taylor conferred with his advisors about defensive positions.
John and Riley had by now been relieved of their gags but they had fourteen days more to carry ball and chain. When Master Sergeant Kaufmann went striding past them Riley called out, “Say now, sergeant, what if that fancy Mex cavalry comes charging across the river, eh? How are me and Johnny here to fight if we’re chained down by these damn cannonballs?” Kaufmann gave him the barest glance and went on without a word. Riley looked at John and said, “I have prayed to the good Lord to let me have but five minutes alone with that son of a bitch, just five minutes to set things right with him and I can die a happy man.”
“You best pray I dont beat you to him,” John said.
The Mexican major now barked orders to his troop and the lancers reined their horses around and the unit trotted off in smart formation down the dusty street and back toward the garrison. The band marched along after, still playing as it went, its volume falling fainter as it moved away from the river. A moment later the only Mexicans still in evidence on the other shore were the sentinels and a few lingering civilians.
While diplomatic efforts to avoid war continued between Washington and Mexico City, Taylor was under orders to stay in place and take no hostile action except in response to Mexican attack. Rumors were rife, the most common of them that the Mexicans across the river were waiting only for the arrival of several more regiments before making their charge. Against that possibility Taylor ordered work to begin immediately on an earthen defense work to be called Fort Texas. It was positioned on the bluff and would have five sides. Its outer walls would be nine feet high and fifteen feet thick. Toward its construction each regiment provided daily labor in the form of rotating fatigue details, and as compensation each man on the detail received a gill of whiskey at the end of the day’s work. Required to work with the construction crews every day but denied the whiskey allowance were all men under punishment, including John Little and Jack Riley, who had to labor with ball and chain. They fetched and carried materials and tools, mixed buckets of mud mortar, applied pick and shovel, and all the while cursed the army that treated them less like soldiers than as beasts of burden.
Lucas Malone volunteered for the labor detail at every opportunity and so on most days found himself working in proximity to John and Riley. John introduced Lucas and Handsome Jack to each other one sultry afternoon when they were all shoveling construction debris into wheelbarrows along the fort’s south wall. Thunderheads were rising like bloodstained purple towers over the Gulf and the sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses of Matamoros. Riley asked what part of Ireland his family was from. Lucas said County Galway and Riley grinned widely. “But that’s me birthplace, man! Some Malones lived a few miles north of us. Could they have been kin?” Lucas said they might have been but he couldn’t be sure. They’d had lots of Malone kin in the old country but his granddaddy had fled the sod after killing a man in a donnybrook. He’d kept on running after reaching New York and didn’t stop until he made Tennessee.
Riley asked Lucas why he volunteered for the labor gang. “Bad enough to have to do this as punishment,” he said.
“Because I’d anytime ruther work like a man,” said Lucas, “than march around on a drill field playin at being a soldier. March and drill, drill and march. That’s all we do in this fuckin army camp.”
“Dont be calling it an army camp,” Riley said. “It’s a bloody prison is what it is.”
Remembering the city prison in New Orleans, John thought Handsome Jack was wrong about that. “Hell Jack, it’s only another seven days with these ornaments on our legs,” he said.
“Only seven days left this time,” Riley said. “Then comes the next time, and maybe we’ll wear them sixty days, or ninety. Maybe next time it’ll be the fucking yoke for a month or so. Maybe it’ll be the bloody lash. These bastards can do any damn … hello, what’s this?”
Their comrades were flocking to the riverside in high commotion, hollering and cheering and waving their hats. A dozen young women, all of them with long black hair and red laughing mouths, had come to the riverbank and there disrobed completely and entered the river to their brown thighs and now were busily soaping themselves and each other and blowing kisses the while to the cheering Americans across the way. Behind them a squad of Mexican soldiers stood at the water’s edge with their rifles unslung and held the girls’ clothes and pointed across to the Americans and laughed and said things to the women and quickly back-stepped grinning when the girls splashed water at them. Some of the Americans removed their boots and walked partway into the river and called for the women to come over to their side. The women laughed and splashed water in their direction and jumped up and down so that their dark-nippled breasts jounced the more. They soaped each other’s gleaming buttocks and threw their heads back and rounded their mouths in mock orgasmic delight as they worked a thick soapy lather into the hairy patches between their legs. The Americans were howling like penned dogs.
“Sweet Jesus,” Riley said with a grin, “I been struck mad by the bleeding sun, I have.”
Lucas laughed at the happy vision of all that lovely female nakedness in the bright sunlight. He clapped John on the shoulder and pointed to one girl after another. “Look there at her, Johnny—right over there! Oh, and that one, over there, with the bush big as a beaver. You see her? God damn!”
Now officers had arrived on the scene with sabers in hand and were shoving their way to the forefront of the crowd of soldiers. The girls were beckoning to the Americans and cupping their pretty breasts to them and calling endearments to them in Spanish. And now some of the Americans had waded out to the river’s depths and begun swimming for the other side and the officers ran into the water to their knees and commanded them to turn back immediately. Some of them did but several swam on and midway across the river one of them began to thrash wildly and quite abruptly sank from sight and his body would be found the next day caught against the bank on a tree root at a point more than twenty miles downstream near the mouth of the river.
Three made it across to the shallows opposite and one of them might yet have drowned even then except several off the girls came out and helped him to his feet. The other two Yankees were also helped to wade out onto the bank in their dripping pants. They all three looked back at their cheering comrades and waved and hugged naked girls to them and patted the girls’ haunches and buttocks and squeezed their breasts. The girls playfully slapped away their hands and now hurried back into their clothes as the Americans kept at kissing and fondling them the while. The Mexican soldiers laughed and shook the Americans’ hands and patted their backs in the manner of old friends. Again dressed in their loose cotton skirts and lowcut sleeveless blouses the girls put their arms around the necks of the American soldiers and the Americans stroked their hips and all of them walked away laughing together down the street and around a corner and out of sight.
A half-dozen officers now stood in the shallows on this side of the river with pistols in hand and commanded the men away from the bank and back to their units. The soldiers were still dazed and breathless from the spectacle of the Mexican girls and were slow to comply, but they did as they were ordered.
All evening the talk around the campfires was of the wonderful exhibition the girls had put on and of the grand time the three who swam across must be having. Bets were made whether they would return, the odds favoring that they would, because the penalty for desertion was far more severe than for simply being absent without leave to have a good time with a girl.
They were struck that night by a violent storm that jarred them awake in fearful certainty that the camp was under artillery attack, so explosive were the thunderclaps. Lightning lit the night with a ghostly incandescence. The wind shook the trees and tore at the tents and carried some away. The river rushed and swelled and overran its banks. It ripped through the brush and made a mire of the lower reaches of the American camp. The storm raged through the night and finally broke just before dawn. The water receded swiftly and the sun rose red as blood over a landscape sodden and fetid with mud and littered with tents and roof straw and river reeds, with uprooted shrubs and drowned dogs and half-plucked chickens caught on driftwood at the river’s edge.
That afternoon one of the three who’d crossed the river to be with the girls came back, rowed across by a pair of Mexican soldiers with a white flag attached to the muzzle of a rifle. They let him out of the boat in the shallows and quickly rowed back to their own side.
The soldier, Thomson by name, was brighteyed with excitement and told the men who gathered round him on the bank—John and Lucas and Handsome Jack among that avid audience—what a wonderful and generous people the Mexicans were, how religious, how beautiful and affectionate the women, how delicious the food and delightful the music. Thomson said the other two were not coming back. The only reason he himself had returned was that he did not want to break his mother’s heart.
Now a guard detail showed up and the lieutenant in charge placed him under arrest and they took him away. None of them ever saw him again.
The next morning another seven soldiers swam the river, and then five more the day after that. Taylor increased the number of guards along the bank and gave specific orders that nobody was to go in the water except to bathe and then no deeper than his knees. The next day fourteen men swam across. Taylor posted a new directive: Any man seen swimming toward the other side would be warned to turn back and if he did not he would be shot. When one of Taylor’s staff officers pointed out that desertion in peacetime was not a capital offense, Taylor responded gruffly: “Disobeying my orders can damn sure be.”
The following day four men pretending to bathe in the shallows suddenly began swimming hard for the other shore and ignored the American guards’ calls to turn about. In full view of the camp and the Mexicans watching from the other bank the guards opened fire and two of the swimmers spasmed and flailed and bright red billows spread around them in the brown water and they sank from sight. The other two made it across and were hastily hustled away by the Mexican guards.
A week after the exhibition at the river, the sergeant of the guard led John and Riley to the smitty’s tent next to the main corral where each was relieved of his ball and chain. As they came out of the tent Riley clicked his heels and John laughed.
That evening dozens of copies of a Mexican handbill were somehow smuggled past the sentries and were soon circulating throughout the camp. They bore the signature of Pedro Ampudia, commanding general of the Mexican Army of the North:
Know ye: that the government of the United States is committing repeated acts of barbarous aggression against the magnanimous Mexican Nation; that the government which exists under “the flag of the stars” is unworthy of the designation of Christian. Recollect now you men born in Great Britain; that the American government looks with coldness upon the powerful flag of St. George, and is provoking to a rupture the warlike people to whom it belongs; President Polk boldly manifests a desire to take possession of Oregon, as he has already done to Texas. Now, then, come with all confidence to the Mexican ranks, and I guarantee to you, upon my honor, good treatment, and that all your expenses shall be defrayed until your arrival in the beautiful capital of Mexico. These words of friendship and honor I offer in Christian brotherhood not only to the good men of Great Britain, but, as well, to all men of Catholic brotherhood presently enslaved in the army of the United States, whatever your nativity, and urge you all to separate yourselves from the Yankees.
“What you make of it, John?” Lucas asked, reading the broadside over one of Riley’s shoulders while John read it over the other.
“The man wants the Brits to quit this army and join his,” John said.
“I know that” Lucas said. “Do ye reckon he means Americans too?”
“It dont say he’d turn a Yankee down,” Riley said. “He’s awful shy, though, aint he, about saying just how much he’ll pay a man to go over?” They all three looked at one another but none said anymore about it.
All over the camp soldiers were ridiculing the handbill, pretending to wipe themselves with it and putting matches to it and pointing at each other and calling, “Catlick slave! Catlick slave!” But some among the Irish were not laughing, nor some of the Germans. They looked at each other and glanced repeatedly across the river. And each look they gave to the other side was longer than the one before.
That night John dreamt he was running hard through a wide marsh and every time he looked back he saw Daddyjack coming behind him at a walk, following a tracking hound on a leash and steadily gaining ground on John. And then it was no longer a hound on the end of the leash but Maggie, fully naked and moving on all fours as smoothly as a hunting dog, her face close to the ground and hard on his scent, leading Daddyjack on a zigzag course but always toward John, always closing the distance though John was running hard and gasping and felt his heart would burst in his chest. Daddyjack was closing the distance and now yelled, “Blood always finds blood! Always!” And now Maggie was upright and laughing, her pretty breasts jiggling as she trotted ahead of Daddyjack on the leash….
And then he was awake, sitting up and gasping and pouring sweat, and Lucas Malone and Jack Riley were sitting up too and staring at him in the moonlit tent and he guessed he must have cried out. But neither said anything to him. After a moment he lay back down and heard them sigh hard and resettle themselves too. And each man of them lay awake late into the night with the rough company of his own thoughts.
One afternoon Colonel Truman Cross, the army’s popular quartermaster, went out riding in the chaparral and did not return. There had been reports of Mexican guerrilla bands prowling on the north side of the river and now rumors flew through the camp that they had killed Cross. Some in the local populace told the American authorities that most of these guerrilla troops, whom they called rancheros, were nothing more than savage bandits who had for years terrorized the borderland, gangs of robbers, killers, renegades, rustlers and scalphunters. The two most notorious ranchero bands were led by Ramón Falcón and the infamous Antonio Canales, once president of the short-lived and violent República del Rio Grande. Both men were long-time and bitterly despised enemies of Texans. They had been young officers under Santa Ana at the Alamo and had both been at Mier. Each with his own band had raided Texas throughout its ten years as a republic. The locals warned Taylor that in addition to robbing and killing Mexicans as they always had, the rancheros would now also plunder U. S. supply trains and freely murder Americans in the name of defending the fatherland. Testifying to this view of the rancheros as bloody marauders unworthy of military respect were the Texas Rangers now serving with Taylor. Under command of Colonel Samuel Walker they were the first volunteers Old Zack had accepted into his army, and they had countless tales to tell of ranchero barbarities. Those familiar with the Lone Star way of warfare knew that many such tales could be told about the Texans as well. Indeed, Taylor had accepted the Texas volunteers in the belief that the best way to fight a band of savages was with his own band of savages. Still, some who heard the Texans’ stories did not believe the larger portion of them. They attributed the Rangers’ gruesome narrative excesses to their well-known hatred of all things Mexican.
And then the ten-man patrol that had been sent out in search of Colonel Cross came back on five foundered beasts and none of their own good horses. Came back two men per horse and every manjack of them naked and tied belly-down over the animal. Two of the corpses were altogether headless and the rest dripping blood and gore from their scalped crowns and the raw wounds between their legs wherefrom the genitals had been severed. Some bore the detached privates in their mouths and some lacked hands and some had been docked of their ears or noses and some were eyeless. Many of the young Americans who looked upon them had never seen such things before except perhaps in nightmares or in imaginings roused by the vile tales of drunken old Indianfighters. And no man among them did now disbelieve the Texans’ stories of ranchero cruelty.
Shortly afterward the body of Colonel Cross was found in the chaparral and it too had been mutilated.
The Yankees seethed with yearning for revenge.
The first handbill urging Americans to desert was soon followed by others, each more detailed and explicit in its arguments and inducements than the one before. The fliers pointed out that, unlike the U. S., Mexico was a devoutly Catholic country where slavery was outlawed. They asked why Yankee Catholics or any men who truly believed in liberty and justice for all should make war against one another. They argued that the Irish, especially, had stronger bonds with Mexicans in their common religious faith than they did with American Protestant soldiers. They pledged that any Yankee who chose to fight in defense of Mexico and the Holy Mother Church would be well rewarded for his honorable action. They promised an enlistment bonus to every American who joined the Mexican side. They promised that every man would be given a rank commensurate with his training and experience but in no case would he hold a rank lower than that which he had in the American army and in all cases he would be better paid. And they promised land. Every man who came over to the Mexican side would receive a minimum of 200 square acres of arable land with at least another 100 acres added for every year of service.
On a clear evening shortly after the most recent bunch of these leaflets had as mysteriously as always found its way across the river and into the Yankee camp, the three friends sat on the bluff and looked across at the brightly lighted town where a fiesta was taking place. Taylor had now posted sentries every few yards along the bank as much to keep his own soldiers from absconding to the other side as to defend against infiltrators. The guards were under order to shoot any man who set foot in the water.
The sounds of music and laughter carried to them from the fiesta. The aromas of spicy Mexican foods mingled with the ripe smells of the surrounding countryside. Fireflies flared greenly yellow on the soft night air.
Lucas Malone was scooping handfuls of dirt and sifting it through his fingers. His gaze was vague and far away.
“I was talking to this Mexie fellow today over by the corral who everybody thinks is a muleskinner but he’s not,” Riley said, speaking barely above a whisper and looking off across the river. “He’s from the other side, dont you know. Name’s Mauricio. He speaks good English and he’s been talking to lots of the fellas, he has. Other harps mostly, but to the Germans too. Says there’s forty or more of us already over there.”
John looked at him but said nothing. Lucas looked at the dirt slipping through his fingers.
“He says I’d be made an officer,” Riley said, still not looking at them. “Says Ampudia will know me for the soldier I am.”
No one spoke. Then Riley said: “How else are you ever to get that piece of land ye claim to want so dearly?”
Lucas looked at him sharply.
“I dont believe they can lose the war,” Riley said in a whisper. “There’s too many of them. Hell, the country itself will beat this army. Have you seen the maps? It’s all mountains from one end to the other.”
He turned to them now. “It’s not everybody gets a chance for the thing he most wants. It’s the chance for me to be the soldier I am, to have the rank I deserve. You, Lucas Malone, I know what ye want. This is your chance too, it is. And you, Johnny, what is it ye be wanting above all else? Is it your own plot of ground, like Lucas here? I’ve seen the look in your eye when he talks of it, but I’ve never heard ye say.”
John looked from one to the other. What he wanted was unsayable. No way is there for a man to explain what he cannot put in words to himself, what he knows only in the pulsing of his blood. How might he tell that he wanted an end to the dreams of Daddyjack and Maggie? An end to waking in the night with his heart wild in his throat, choking on his own fear, feeling hunted by some dire nemesis drawing closer with every bloody sundown?
“Without a place to call his own,” he said, “a man aint but a feather in the wind, now aint he?”
He favored waiting another few days until the moon waned out of sight—or at least until a cloudy night gave them better cover—but Riley and Lucas were set on crossing that very night. And so shortly after midnight they slipped out of the tent and worked their stealthy way through the Cottonwood shadows upriver for a quarter-mile and then scanned the near bank from cover of the trees. They spotted a lone sentry singing softly to himself and strolling in the pale light of the cresent moon blazing brightly in a starry sky. No other guard close by. John attracted his attention by lightly rustling the brush and the guard warily approached with his longarm ready at the hip. As the sentry passed by him Riley stepped out from behind a tree and drove the heel of his riflebutt into the back of his head with a wet crunch. He and Lucas quickly relieved him of his rifle and pouch and the few dollars he had in his pocket and then joined John in the riverbrush. John asked if the sentry was killed and Riley whispered that he was not but he might have a bit of trouble walking a straight line ever again.
They stripped naked and bundled their clothes tightly and tied the bundles to their rifle barrels. They eased down the bank which was steeper here than it was down by the town and pushed through reeds that cut them like little razors and slipped into the moonlit water. The river tasted of mud and rot. They held their rifles and bundles above their heads and swam one-handed but the river was running faster and deeper than they had thought and they found themselves being carried swiftly downstream.
“Christ,” Lucas gasped as he pulled for the other bank, “we’ll be in front of the camp in hardly a damn minute.”
But they were all three strong swimmers and made an angled headway across the river. They were within twenty feet of the opposite bank when a voice cried, “You there! There in the water! Turn back now or we’ll shoot!”
They stroked with furious desperation now, John in the lead as they reached the cattails and a rifle flashed and cracked on the far bank and the ball smacked the water a foot to his right. He wished the moon would die and go dark. His feet now touched a bottom of soft mud and his breath came hard as he grabbed at the cattails to pull himself to the sloping bank. He felt the reeds cutting his hands but did not feel pain. He flung his rifle and bundle up on the high ground as more rifleshots sounded and a ball buzzed past his ear and smacked the mudbank. He heard Lucas Malone grunt and curse softly behind him and he turned and looked but Lucas was not there. But here came Riley drifting fast alongside and John caught hold of the rifle barrel Handsome Jack extended to him and pulled him into the reeds. Riley slung his sopping things up on the bank and scrambled past him up through the cattails and crawled away into the dark.
As he followed Riley up the bank a half-dozen rifles discharged almost simultaneously and he felt a sharp blow to his lower leg and then a burning and he cursed and squirmed his way up through the reeds. He tumbled up on the bank and pushed his rifle and clothes ahead of him as he crawled into the brush and more shots sounded and rounds hissed through the scrub
He lay low in the thick scrub brush and looked to his left and saw the pale naked form of Lucas Malone crawling awkwardly into the darkness of a willow stand.
The shots were hitting scattered now and John knew the sentries had lost sight of them. The shooting continued for another minute before it finally ceased. He stayed put in case the shooters were simply waiting for him to give some sign of his position. His lower leg was throbbing and he felt of his shin and sucked a hissing breath when his fingers found the wound. He did not move from his hiding place for some time and then a passing cloud momentarily dimmed the moon and he crawled out of the brush and across an open stretch of ground and into the trees. And there found Riley dressed and waiting for him. Riley helped him to his feet and John quickly put on his muddy clothes. When he pulled on his left boot a white flare of pain behind his eyes made him momentarily dizzy. As they moved downstream through the shadows he felt the inside of his boot slickening with blood.
They came upon Lucas Malone sitting with his back against a tree. He’d been shot in the side and was bleeding freely but he could stand and walk. He’d lost his rifle and clothes and was naked in the world. John and Riley gave him their shirts and Lucas wore one in the regular manner and the other tied round his waist in the form of a skirt. “You fuckers laugh,” he hissed, “I’ll put my fist in your goddamn teeth.” Riley and John grinned at him and Lucas Malone cursed them softly for sons of bitches.
They made their way through the trees and inland from the river and shortly came upon a sandy trace and followed it through the blue cast of the moonlight to the edge of town. John’s boot was now heavy with blood.
A pair of sentries stepped out of the shadows with rifles pointed from the hip and challenged, “Quién vive?”
“Friends,” Riley said. “Amigos.”
And now an officer and two more soldiers and a man in civilian clothes came rushing from down the street and Riley again called out, “Amigos, we’re amigos.”
The Mexican in civilian dress said, “Está bien, Nacho. Son irlandeses.” He pointed at Riley. “Yo conozco este grandote.”
“Mauricio!” Riley said. “I didn’t bloody recognize ye.”
Mauricio laughed and he and Riley hugged and patted each other in a rough abrazo.
The officer put up his pistol and grinned at them and said, “Bienvenidos, amigos. You are welcome.”
The officer was Lieutenant Saturnino O’Leary by name, who took great delight in their faces when he told it to them. His father was an Irishman who’d come to Mexico by way of the United States some twenty-five years before and traveled all around the country before settling in Durango and marrying a Mexican woman of good breeding. Saturnino had grown up fluent in the tongues of both parents.
He had John and Lucas assisted into a muledrawn ammunition cart and then escorted them all to the main garrison on the other side of town. On the way to the main post they passed many smaller encampments and it was obvious that the Mexican ranks had been greatly reinforced since the American arrival on the north bank. With these troops had come hundreds of camp followers—wives and sweethearts, chiefly, but a goodly number of whores, as well—and their fires and makeshift settlements were everywhere. Riley and the lieutenant walked together and conversed in low voices but with much gesticulation. At the main garrison they went off while John and Lucas were helped into a large lamplit infirmary tent where they were received by several Mexican nurses. The women giggled and rolled their eyes at each other on seeing Lucas Malone’s manner of dress. They laughed too at the men’s acute embarrassment at being stripped of their wet clothes. The Americans were examined by a Mexican surgeon named Dr. Alonzo who spoke no English but was assisted by a muscular young man named Arturo who possessed a passable pidgin. One end of the tent served as Dr. Alonzo’s work area and included a brazier full of live coals in which were propped a number of iron pokers. The rest of the spacious tent held some three dozen cots, only a half-dozen of which were currently filled, one by a man who looked to be dead.
The doctor treated Lucas first, permitting him several large swallows from a bottle of tequila to gird himself. Lucas pronounced it damn fine stuff. He was made to lie back and Arturo gave him a folded piece of leather to bite on and pressed down hard on his upper arms to hold him in place while the doctor probed the wound for the rifleball. A nurse held a lamp close by and moths fluttered and bumped against its sooty fire-bright glass and some flew too near the top of the lamp glass and fell withering upon Lucas and the doctor flicked them away as he worked. Lucas bared his teeth and cursed through the leather and the muscles stood in his neck like cords. Then Alonzo had the ball and held it up in the forceps for all to see before dropping it with a clank in a tin bowl. He now went to the brazier and withdrew a poker whose tip glowed orange and he told Lucas to bite hard once again. The muscles swelled along Arturo’s arms as he once more pinned Lucas to the table. Lúeas roared through his teeth as the iron sizzled into the wound and then it was over and the sweet waxy smell of seared flesh hung in the tent.
As he was being bandaged Lucas asked in a thick voice if he might have another drop of that fine Mexican spirit. Dr. Alonzo proffered the bottle and let him drink deeply that he might sleep soundly. Lucas was singing “Molly Malone” as a pair of soldiers carried him to a cot where a plump Mexican nurse covered him with a blanket and dried the pain-sweat off his face with a wet cloth and cooed to him as he drifted to sleep.
John’s wound took longer to treat for the fact of the lead ball having glanced the shinbone and burst into fragments. The doctor pronounced that the bone was not fractured, though it was well bruised, and he was an hour picking pieces of lead from the torn flesh. He stared at John’s fresh facial scar and pursed his lips but made no remark on it. As Alonzo tended to him John finished the tequila. Now Arturo held his leg fast as Dr. Alonzo pressed a glowing poker into the wound and again the tent filled with the smell of burning flesh and John shrilled into the leather he bit upon. And in that moment he remembered vividly a time somewhere in Alabama when he had cauterized his brother’s shoulder with a redhot ramrod.
He let the leather fall from his mouth and gasped, “Edward.”
“Qué?” the doctor asked. He looked at his assistant. “Qué dijo?”
“Egg word?” Arturo shrugged. “Quién sabe?”
They were confined to the infirmary tent for the next two weeks with little knowledge of what was happening in the world except what they could gather from reports delivered by Arturo in his malformed English. He told them that Riley had come by to see how they were just hours after the doctor had tended to them, but they’d both been sleeping and Alonzo would not have them wakened. In the days since, Riley had been busy training with the garrison artillery batteries. Arturo referred to him as “temente Riley.” They found out too that General Ampudia had been replaced by General Mariano Arista who had recently arrived with additional troops and sent General Torrejón and his cavalry across the river at a point upstream where they’d fought and defeated a detachment of American dragoons. “Arista es el mejor general, the best most general,” Arturo said fervently. A few days after Torrejón’s victory a band of rancheros had ambushed a troop of Texas Rangers and killed ten of them. “Rinches chingados! Los rancheros they kill good the focking rinches, they kill them focking good!”
After their first few days in the hospital Alonzo permitted Lucas to get out of bed and walk around in the tent, but it was more than a week before he let John start getting about on a crutch. One day Arturo excitedly reported that Taylor had struck his tents and gone to Point Isabel on the Gulf with all his men and wagons save one regiment left behind to defend Fort Texas. The Americans were in bad need of supplies and Taylor knew it would take most of his force to protect the loaded wagons on the way back from the port. Now General Arista had taken the larger portion of his troops and headed downstream of Matamoros where he would cross the river in hopes of trapping Taylor between Fort Texas and Point Isabel.
“Arista he is kill Taylor,” Arturo said gleefully.
Several mornings later they were wakened by the blasting of artillery fire. Though war had not been declared by either side, the Mexicans were bombarding Fort Texas. Except for the curfew cannon back in New Orleans these were the first artillery pieces John had heard in his life and his heart jumped at every thunderous discharge. He grabbed up his crutch and joined Lucas Malone at the tent’s entrance flap where a guard was posted to ensure they kept to the hospital as Alonzo had ordered. The camp was in high excitement and hazy with gunsmoke. They saw a battery set up some forty yards away and spotted Handsome Jack Riley directing the gunners as a Mexican officer looked on.
“Whoooeee!” Lucas hooted. “Jack’s got them boys shootin that gun like it’s a goddamn revolver, they shootin so fast. I hope to hell Kaufmann’s still over there and one of them rounds hits him square in the ass! Blast them, Jack! Blast that fucken Kaufmann to hell and gone!”
The bombardment went on until sundown. The last round lofted across the river was followed by a great cheering from the Mexican troops and their raucous threats to the Yankees on the other bank of more to come.
Shortly after dark that evening Jack Riley came to see them. He wore a Mexican artilleryman’s uniform with its collar insignia depicting an exploding bomb and was grinning whitely through his powder-sooted face. He sat at the foot of John’s bed and heaved a tired sigh and rubbed his face hard. Then cursed them both for lazy bastards and asked when they’d be ready to fight with the San Patricios.
“San Patricios?” John said. “What’s that?”
“The Company of Saint Patrick,” Riley said. “I formed her meself. Taylor’s had a lot more deserters than he’s let on, you see. I found the Matamoros cantinas full of them. Plenty of them said they’d be willing to join the Mexies in exchange for some land of their own, dont ye know—and on condition that they can serve in the same outfit. So I had me an idea and soon enough found meself explaining it to General Arista face to face. And, lads, he liked the notion and gave it his blessing, he did! It’s a company of soldiers all from the other side, almost all Micks, most of them run off from Taylor but a few come down here on their own. Some born in the States but most from the olde sod, by Jesus. We got some German in the bunch, naturally—there’s not an army in the world dont have its Germans, now is there?” John had never seen Handsome Jack so excited. “There’s a few bloody Englishmen with us, and some Scots, and a fella from Canada, dont you know. But like I say, it’s mostly harps like us. Forty-two in the outfit already and I expect we’ll get plenty more as the lads get their fill of being nothing to the Yanks but Irish dogs to kick and decide no more, by Jesus, no more!
“Now the San Patricios aint official yet, you understand, but we soon enough will be. Arista told me so. A matter of paperwork is all. Meanwhile we’re the San Patricios just the bloody same. We wear the Mexie artillery uniform but we’ll have our own banner, we will. Know what the Mexies are calling us? Colorados. The Reds. Because there’s so many redhead Irish in the bunch. Aint it a hoot?”
He paused and looked at them narrowly. “I aint heard neither you fellers say what ye think of me insignia here.” He touched the officer’s brass pinned to his collar above the artillery insignia.
“What’s it mean, Jack?” John asked with a wink at Lucas Malone.
“It means you’ll damned well have to salute me is what it means,” Riley said with a huge smile. “It’s Lieutenant Riley to both you now, and a lieutenant always rates a salute from mere sergeants.” He beamed at them.
John and Lucas exchanged looks.
“That’s right, lads, I said sergeants,” Riley said. “The CO’s a Mexie, of course, but he’s a good fella and a damn fine soldier and he’s let me pick me own non-coms. Now I’m needing you boys at the ready, so ye’ll have to quit your malingering, the both of ye. Doc Alonzo says he’ll turn you loose tomorrow. He says ye’ll be needing a cane still, Johnny, but me and Captain Moreno—he’s the CO—we reckon it’s better to have ye gimping about and learning how to shoot the big guns than leave you to laying on your lazy arse in here any longer.”
He stood up and grinned from one to the other of them. “You’ve been too polite to ask, so I’ll tell you: your pay will sixteen dollars a month, and dont that beat to hell the seven dollars ye were getting as buck privates for old Taylor? And that aint all. Ye’ll be getting title to four hundred acres of land, each of ye. That’s right, lads, I said four hundred. Pray the war lasts a year and ye’ll get another 200 acres besides. This is it, buckos, the chance to fight for something worth fighting for—your own selves, your own land. Ye’ll be men of property, ye will, when all the shooting’s done.”
He withdrew a pair of forms from his tunic pocket and spread them on the bed next to John. “All you got to do is just sign these.”
John picked one up and saw that it was in Spanish.
“Arturo,” Riley called, “bring the doc’s pen and ink there on the table.” The orderly retrieved the implements and Riley dipped the pen and handed it to John.
John hesitated. He looked up from the form and held Jack Riley’s gaze. Handsome Jack’s smile tightened. His blue eyes were hard and bright. “It’s yay or nay, Johnny boy,” he said softly. “A simple yay or nay.”
John flattened the form on the bed and signed it and handed back the pen. Riley dipped it again and passed it to Lucas Malone and Lucas signed too.
Riley blotted the signatures with his sleeve and folded the papers into his pocket. He grinned at them and took a flask from his tunic and uncorked it and raised it in a toast. “To them of us who know the true brotherhood.” He drank and passed the flask to Lucas Malone who turned it up and then passed it to John who raised it to each of the others in turn and drank.
Riley tucked the flask away and said, “See you at reveille, lads—I mean … sergeants.”
He was to the tent door when Lucas called out, “Say now … lieutenant. I got a question. What if we hadn’t signed on?” Malone was smiling but his look was intent. “What would’ve become of us, do ye think?”
Riley looked at them both and grinned. “Why, what else, man? Ye would have stood against a wall in the morning and got shot for spies.” He went out laughing.
They got the brunt of their artillery training during the daily bombardment of Fort Texas. They learned how to move an artillery piece from one position to another, how to unlimber the gun and charge it and set its elevation, how to swab out the piece with a sponge rod and how to cool the barrel with water every so often during firings. John was impressed by Handsome Jack’s smooth proficiency with the big guns. Riley took them to the barricade overlooking the river and gave them a brass telescope and schooled them in the arts of the forward observer. The fort was holding well under the steady barrage and Lucas Malone said, “Christ, we really built that thing, didn’t we?”
Several times a day the crews broke off the shelling to take a rest or eat a meal. During these respites the fort’s acting commander, Major Jacob Brown, would take a turn along the fort’s front walls to inspect for damage. During a break on a windy afternoon when they sat at the emplacements eating a lunch of tacos and beans and watching Brown make his inspection, Riley suddenly said, “The cheek of the son of a bitch.”
He set down his plate and ordered a pair of gun crews to charge two of the pieces with high explosive shell. The Mexican artillery was still using chiefly solid shot ammunition and Riley was daily petitioning Captain Moreno for explosive shell, arguing that their artillery would be no match for the Yankee guns without it. Moreno agreed but his requisitions to the high command in Mexico City were routinely denied without explanation or simply ignored. What little high explosive ammunition they had was precious but at the moment Riley didn’t care. He was set on killing Brown and shell was the sure way to do it. He positioned himself at one of the guns and posted a skilled gunner named Octavo at the other. He determined the elevation of the guns by eye and called it out to Octavo. As Brown strolled slowly before the wall and made his careful scrutiny Riley aimed his gun at a point directly behind him and had the Mexican gunner aim about fifteen yards ahead of the Yankee. Now he and the Mexican each lighted a cigar and puffed vigorously and then blew the ash off the tips and then held them down close to the touch-hole. The soldados made bets and jokes and looked on intently. When Brown arrived at the spot Riley judged to be midway between the two target points he said, “Ya!” and he and Octavo touched the cigar tips to the vents and the guns boomed almost simultaneously.
Brown whirled at the sound of the guns and started to run back the way he had come and it was as though a deer in full stride had been led perfectly by the hunter’s gunsights: He took perhaps three strides before the Mexican’s shell exploded well behind him at the same instant that Riley’s round landed at his feet and the blast threw him high and twirling in the air like a doll coming apart at its seams and flinging blood and losing limbs in every direction and he fell back to the earth in pieces.
The Mexican troops and the San Patricios cheered lustily as the smoky dust cleared from across the river and the figures of other Americans warily emerged from the fort to gather Brown’s scattered remains. And now a large solitary figure came stalking forth to the very edge of the river and stood there brandishing a bowie knife and hollering imprecations only faintly heard at the Mexican emplacement yet clear enough to be understood as directed at Jack Riley and John Little. It was the Great Western cursing them for traitorous murdering bastards and vowing to shoot them dead and shed them of their manly parts besides. As she carried on in this way, Riley called John forward and gestured for a rifleman to give him his weapon and said, “Give her a recognition, Johnny, with that hawkeye of yours.” John assumed a prone position and braced the rifle on a large rock before him and ripped up a few weed strands and tossed them in the air to gauge the wind. He adjusted his sights for Tennessee windage and Kentucky elevation and took a deep breath and released half of it and aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The Borginnis woman’s high-crowned hat jumped off her head and described an upriver arc in the breeze and bounded along the riverbank and a dog ran it down and caught it and shook it from side to side like a hare.
Riley whooped. “That’ll give her something to think about besides cutting off our peckers, by Jesus! Nice shooting, Johnny!”
The Great Western put her hand to her bare head and turned to see the dog worrying her hat some yards upstream. She looked back across the river and even at this distance they could see her white grin. She cupped her hands round her mouth and bellowed, “I won’t miss you … you bastards!’’
A few days later Taylor would issue a general order renaming the place Fort Brown. But for months after, the Mexican Army of the North would be talking of the round the Irishman Riley put in the Yankee officer’s pocket on the Rio Bravo.
They’d been shelling the fort for a week when late one morning they heard the thumping of distant artillery and spied dust on the horizon to the north and knew the two armies had engaged. They judged the fight to be about ten miles removed and centered near the Palo Alto pond. By late afternoon there was thick white smoke on the sky which they would come to learn was from grassfires ignited by burning powder wads of American artillery. Mexican wounded would burn to death as the fires spread through the chaparral. Riley cursed Arista’s stupidity in having taken only round shot for his guns. “The Yanks are using explosive shell and he’s shooting at them with iron balls. Jesus! Why not throw stones at them for all the good of round shot?” Captain Moreno took him aside and suggested he keep such insubordinate opinions to himself. Yet they soon enough heard of how the Yankees laughed at the solid shot and made a game of sidestepping it as it rolled past and was chased after by the dogs.
The battlesounds ceased at sunset but the grassfires continued to burn and the northern sky flickered redly through the night. Speculation was rampant in the garrison and wholly uninformed. The fighting resumed at dawn the next day at but half the distance, the crackling of small arms now audible between bursts of artillery. “Moreno believes they be roundabouts a dry riverbed called Resaca de la Palma,” Riley told John and Lucas. “Says the chaparral’s thick as Moses’ beard out there.”
Dust and smoke rose densely from that direction. And now they heard other sounds mingled with the booming of the field guns and the crack and pop of rifles. Heard the shrill of horses, heard war cries and screams of fury and fear and agony. And now they spied a scattering of lancers riding pell-mell for the river and every man of them clearly desperate for greater speed as they lashed at their mounts and dug rowels into the animals’ bloody flanks and the lathered horses came hard with their eyes white with terror. Behind them came more riders and behind the horsemen came the greater mass of the broken and terrified Mexican infantry running headlong, some with their rifles still in hand, many devoid of all weapons, running as if from the devil himself. Never had John seen fear on such scale as this nor heard such a collective wail of despair. The Mexicans ran wildeyed into the river and some spilled headlong in the shallows and were trampled by those behind and in some places men drowned in less than a foot of water. They splashed frantically for the south bank and some floundered and sank from sight in mid-river and none alongside or behind these drowning comrades thought to save them, caught up in their own frenzy to escape the Yankee demons on their heels. And those demons now hove into sight and came shrieking with bloodlust and ready bayonets and they skewered every fallen Mexican they came upon.
Thus did Arista’s troops come back from their first full engagement with the Americans. Moreno and Riley had already resumed shelling the fort to hold at bay the troops within and keep them from joining in the slaughter.
John had cast aside his cane and was working with one of Riley’s gun crews. And even as they fired round after round on Fort Texas across the way they caught each other’s eyes, he and Riley and Lucas Malone, and all three knew the war had truly begun and the dice of their future days were tossed and tumbling.
Over the next nights Matamoros lay awake amid the moans of the dead and dying, the howls of encroaching wolves. The heat of day hummed with hordes of fat green flies. The walls of Fort Texas and the Matamoros rooftops were crowded with buzzards looking like solemn red-cowled priests attending a mass funeral.
Burial parties on both sides of the river worked round the clock to put the dead in the ground. But the going was slow and at night the lobos could be heard snapping and growling and tearing at the corpses.
Reporters traveling with Taylor’s army claimed the wolves preferred to feed on American dead rather than on the degenerate enspiced flesh of the Mexicans.
Four days later the United States declared war on Mexico.
Arista’s battered Army of the North abandoned Matamoros and all the sick and wounded and took with them a thousand camp followers and trudged southwest for nearly two hundred punishing miles to the town of Linares. The trek was through treeless brushcountry under a broiling sun that at last gave way to blessed rain which quickly became a two-day downpour that turned the countryside to mud. Wagons mired and animals bogged. They ran out of rations and slaughtered and ate pack animals and discarded the equipment they had borne.
At Linares they rested and regrouped and awaited further orders from Mexico City. They passed the rest of spring and the first half of summer in training and regaining strength. During this time yet more American deserters found their way to them and signed enlistment contracts and were placed with the new company of foreigners calling themselves the San Patricios but known to the Mexicans by several different names including “los colorados” and “los voluntarios irlandeses.” When they were not training they were at local fiestas or the cockfights or the rodeos or in the cantinas, drinking and dicing and singing along with the guitar players. They larked with the girls in the bagnios. It was a mindless time of the sort familiar to all soldiers who have ever waited for the call to battle. But every now and then a look passed between the three friends, a look bespeaking a sad foreknowledge understood to them all though none could have explained it if he’d wanted to, which none of them did.
John now discovered that tequila in sufficient quantity did much to keep his dreams at bay. He learned how much and how fast to drink of an evening so that he could get back to camp under his own power and yet sleep dreamless as a stone. The hangovers were a small price to pay for sleep undisturbed by visions of his past, but the nightly fights were another matter. He was now easily provoked and had again taken to carrying a knife in his boot. He cut out a local citizen’s eye in an alley scrape, and in another tavern brawl cut two Mexican comrades so severely it was thought they would die, though neither did. The civilian was a known thief and despoiler of young girls and so nobody made a case for him, but in the latter incident the army charged John with criminal assault.
At the trial Lieutenant John Riley argued on John’s behalf before General Arista and his judicial staff, citing Sergeant Little as a valuable member of the San Patricio Battalion, a man who had risked his life crossing the Rio Bravo to come fight for Mexico, and one who had simply been defending himself in the saloon fight in question. General Arista himself presided over the court. He looked intently at John Little and remarked that he was most grateful to him for his allegiance to Mexico but hoped he would find no future cause to defend himself so well against anyone but the Yankee invaders. And then dismissed the charges.
Arista had greater problems than John Little. In July he was court-martialed for his blundering leadership at Matamoros and dismissed from the army. Again appointed commander of the Army of the North was Pedro Ampudia, he who once cut off a rival general’s head and fried it in oil the better to preserve it for display over the main gate of his hacienda.
Rumors were rife too that Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana would soon be back from exile in Cuba to take over the presidency as well as the army.
In midsummer the Mexican army moved to Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, a venerable old city on the north bank of the Rio Santa Catarina. The city was encircled by jagged gothic-spired ranges awesome to the San Patricios, few of whom had seen mountains other than the Appalachians, tame inclines by comparison. They enjoyed the city’s splendor and amenities for a few short weeks before word came in September of Taylor’s advancing force. The Patricios were posted with the big guns in the Citadel, an impregnable fortress the Mexicans called the Bishop’s Palace and which the Americans would come to name the Black Fort. Hundreds of residents fled the city in advance of Taylor’s coming, taking with them all they could load on their animals and carry in their arms. Others remained and formed citizens’ brigades and put up barricades in the streets. A party of Roman Catholic bishops performed a series of benediction rites on the front steps of the main cathedral.
On a gray Friday afternoon, the eighteenth of September, Taylor appeared at the edge of a woods on the outskirts of town in the company of a dozen officers. The San Patricios knew him even at the distance, knew his white horse and the attitude of its rider. At a wall of the Citadel Riley said he believed he could win the war right now. He adjusted the elevation of his gun and touched off the piece. The solid-shot cannonball keened through the air and struck not ten yards in front of Old Zack and bounced and cleared his head by less than three feet. Had Taylor been standing in the stirrups the ball would have taken off his head. Had the round been explosive it would have reduced the man to stewmeat. It was altogether a spectacular shot and the Mexicans cheered it wildly and pounded Riley on the back.
But Taylor wasn’t standing in the stirrups and the round was not explosive and at the ball’s passing he turned in the saddle to watch it bound into a pecan grove with a pack of camp dogs in yammering pursuit of it. He leaned and spat and reined his horse about and said to his wide-eyed staff, “I expect you fellers’d feel more comfortable if we took ourselves back a bit, say to that fine little spring we saw the other side a them pecan trees?” And so they did.
All through the night Mexican bugles played the “Deguello,” a chilling tune signifying no quarter, the piece inherited from the Spanish who first heard it as an ancient Moorish chant calling for the cutting of every last enemy throat.
And in the morning the battle began.
The fighting raged three days and nights. The U.S. artillery was of meager effect against the Bishop’s Palace and the Mexican round shot was good for little save laughter in the American ranks. The early fighting was between cavalries, and then the infantries clashed at the town perimeters, and then the fighting was house-to-house in the streets. A thick haze of gunsmoke rose over the town. The bayonet ruled. Blood ran in the cobblestones, streamed from the rooftop gutters, spattered the whitewashed walls. Came a thunderstorm and then another as the fighting raged on. The surrounding countryside went to mud. Rainwater ran pink in the streets. The carnage showed stark under shivering blue lightning. The San Patricios fired and fired their cannons into the Yankees until all shot was spent and then took up their muskets. Curses carried in English and in Spanish. Men shrieked in terror and murderous intent, screamed for help, cried for God’s mercy, begged for their mother’s tender hand. Women joined the barricade defenses and proved fierce soldaderas. John saw one cleave a Yankee head with a two-hand swipe of her machete a moment before she was skewered by bayonets and blood gouted from her mouth and she cursed her killers and died. The Americans brought cannister to bear on the barricades and fired point-blank as with Brobding-nagian shotguns and Mexican defenders flew back with faces gone, limbs severed, viscera looping through the air, blood spraying and mixing with the falling rain. The air stank of gore and shit. The monstrous elephant was amok.
Three days of slaughter exhausted both sides. An armistice was struck and the shooting stopped. The dead lay everywhere. Mounds of mutilated men and women. A vast fly-swarmed bloating of horses and mules. Carrion birds blacked the sky. The howls and harries of wolves drove grave-digging parties to distraction. The stench of the dead was a continuing assault.
A joint commission of American and Mexican officers agreed to the surrender of Monterrey on the condition that the Mexican army be permitted to retire from the city with its weapons. The evacuation took three days. The Mexicans marched away with drums beating and banners waving high. The Yankee ranks muttered and watched them pass by and some recognized the deserters among them and let out cries of execration. Riley especially was the object of their curses and maledict warnings. He spat and stared straight ahead but Lucas Malone grinned at the Yankees’ raging faces and recognized Master Sergeant Kaufmann among them and gestured obscenely at him and at them all. A platoon of Irishmen who’d kept the faith and hated the deserters for having blacked the reputations of all sons of Eire started for him but were driven back by their mounted officers. “We’ll have at them in good time, boys,” John heard a Yank officer say. “You’ll see. They can only run so far and then we’ll have them, by God.”
They retreated two hundred fifty miles south to the silvermine city of San Luis Potosí, more than a mile high in the mountains, and there regrouped yet once again. Santa Ana had returned from Cuba as expected and was hailed by his countrymen as the Deliverer. He took charge of the army and reformed it as the Liberating Army of the North. He granted permission for the San Patricios to fly their own flag and Riley engaged the nuns of the local convent to fashion a banner of his design. Green silk it was, showing on one side a shamrock and a harp bordered by the Mexican coat of arms and its motto, “Libertad por la Republica Mexicana,” and underneath the harp the motto, “Erin go Bragh.” On the other side of the banner was a painting of Saint Patrick with a key in his left hand and in his right a staff pinioning a serpent, and under the painting was the name “San Patricio.” The men of the company cheered lustily at its first unfurling. John was surprised to feel himself stirred by this emblem of men like himself, by this bright green flag of the rootless and the damned.
They trained and readied and recruited for the next four months and in that time another fifty Americans deserted Taylor and made their way to San Luis to join the Saint Patricks. Riley was all business in the training of them. The loss at Monterrey had shaken his certainty that Mexico would win the war against the Americans—or gringos, as the Mexicans had taken to calling the invaders, deriving the name from “Green Grow the Rushes,” a song the Yankees were often heard to sing. Handsome Jack tried not to show it but John and Lucas could see that his confidence in Mexican army leadership had shrunk considerably since Monterrey.
But if Riley’s faith in their leaders was waning, his fidelity to the Saint Patricks grew ever greater—and he would abide no failure of the faith in his comrades. In November two men of the company deserted. They were captured a week later in civilian clothes as they tried to make their way to Tampico to get a ship out of the country. They were brought back to San Luis Potosí in manacles and put on trial for desertion. The adjudicating officers were a regimental infantry colonel named Gomez, Captain Moreno and Lieutenant Riley. All three voted for conviction. Colonel Gomez was against the death penalty but was overruled by Moreno and Riley. Riley requested and was granted command of the firing squad. He ordered all Saint Patricks to attend the executions.
“No one knows the seriousness of desertion better than those who have themselves deserted,” he told the assembled company. “A man may have good cause to desert once, aye, but he who deserts twice proves himself a faithless vagabond deserving of no man’s brotherhood. So it is with these two. At least from us they receive a bullet, but never forget that should you be taken by the enemy what you’ll get is a noose.”
The condemned were stood each in his turn before a side wall of the central plaza cathedral and permitted to say a few last words before being blindfolded. The first said he wanted someone to tell his mother he loved her. The second said he hoped the whole damned world went to heaven so he wouldn’t have to see any of it again in hell. They were shot by a six-man San Patricio firing squad selected by lots and including Lucas Malone. That evening when they were drunk in the Oso Rojo, Lucas told John, “Damnedest thing. For a minute there I thought I was takin aim at meself. Saw meself standin there blindfolded. Damnedest thing …”
John said nothing, though in truth the executions had made him wonder how much real difference there was between them and the army they’d deserted. And Riley’s argument that desertion was permissible the first time but never thereafter struck him as self-serving horseshit. Every desertion was damnable or no desertion was. But he was an officer now, Handsome Jack, and John wondered if perhaps officers had more in common with other officers—officers of any army—than they did with the men in the ranks.
Came Christmas Eve, and while Jack Riley was at midnight mass and Lucas Malone with a Mexican girl he’d recently taken up with, John got into a fight with two men at the Oso Rojo. He gave one a kick to the balls that lifted him a foot off the floor before he fell in a vomiting heap, then broke the other’s arm in shedding him of his knife and flung him from the cantina into the street. Not two minutes later this man returned with a pepperbox pistol in his good hand and shot John twice in the back as he stood at the bar. John slumped against the counter and turned around and the man now shot him once in the chest and then the pistol misfired on the next two tries and the assailant turned and ran away. John slipped to the floor and fell over on the hardpacked clay and felt the life running out of him. He heard Daddyjack’s loud laughter and thought also he heard Maggie weeping. He lay with his cheek against the cold clay and felt eyes looking down upon him and he thought, So this is how I’m done with.
He was not however done with, though the doctors could not extract one of the pistolballs and so left it in him and it was two weeks before they were willing to say he might not die of his wounds. He was still very weak near the end of January when Santa Ana and the army departed north for another fight with the gringos. On the night before they left, Riley and Lucas paid him a visit in the hospital. Handsome Jack pressed a medallion of the Holy Mother into his palm. Lucas Malone said he would bring him Kaufmann’s ears. After they left, John gave the medallion to one of the nurses.
He was up and walking in two weeks and another week after that was deemed well enough to serve as a wagon guard on an ammunition train to Querétaro a hundred miles south. But he was in truth still very weak and on arrival in Querétaro was taken with bone-wracking fever and a fierce case of bloody diarrhea. He was laid in the garrison hospital tent already crowded with men suffering from sickness of every sort. Day and night the dead were carried out and placed in the deadcart to be trundled to the graveyard and new patients were brought in to replace them.
The nurses were dedicated girls and women who brought in food and carted out slop jars, tried to feed those who could eat without throwing up, did their best to comfort the dying. He was for a time delirious more often than not but was sometimes aware of his hand being held. In his delirium he sometimes saw Maggie at his bedside dressed in black and weeping and sometimes he saw her naked and asking if he wanted to do it, saying that she would do whatever he wanted because he was her brother and she loved him and had no one else in the world who loved her. Sometimes she was so radiantly beautiful he wanted to weep. But sometimes her body was covered with ugly rankly suppurating sores and her face grotesquely distorted and his horror ran in his blood like ice.
Other times it was Daddyjack he saw sitting at the foot of his bed and grinning like a fleshless one-eyed skull and saying, “Look at ye now, laying in you own shit and caint hardly pull a proper breath thout it hurtin. Hell, boy, ye aint really worth a whole lot now, are ye?” And sometimes he was back in the smoky rainsoaked carnage of Monterrey, seeing the sundered flesh and hearing the unworldly screams and smelling effluvia so horrid it might have come from the bowels of hell.
When at last he surfaced from the fever he found his hand in that of a young nurse who said her name was Elena. Her mestizo eyes were as darkly bright as indigo pools under moonlight. She had been educated by Jesuits and spoke English well. She called him Juanito and said they had been sure he would die but she had prayed every hour that he would not. He had been there nearly two weeks and was shrunken to hide and bone and he ached to his very marrow. She told him he had often screamed of people with strange names but he was all right now and needed only rest and nourishment and time to regain his strength. She told him of Santa Ana’s victory over the gringos at Angostura—which the Yankees called Buena Vista—and of the high price paid for it. Many more on both sides had been killed at Angostura than at Monterrey. Much of the talk, Elena told him, was of the San Patricio Company that fought so valiantly, though almost half of them were reported killed. She knew little else about the battle but at his urging undertook to find out what she could. She learned that neither Juan Riley nor Lucas Malone was listed as killed, that in fact Juan Riley had been promoted to captain for his brilliant leadership and bravery in the fight. Moreno had been made a colonel. Santa Ana’s army was now back at San Luis Potosí
A week later he was sitting up and taking broth and his fever was much reduced. So great was the need for hospital beds that Elena was granted her request that he be discharged into her care. She took him home where she lived with her mother. Her father had been an educated man of Spanish bloodline, a Creole, and as an officer in Santa Ana’s army in the war against Texas had been killed at San Jacinto. She had no brothers. The mother was a wizened thing who kept to her tiny room whose walls were hung with crucifixes and whose shelves held dozens of saintly icons and where she passed her days and nights in whispered prayers to them all.
She fed him and bathed him until he was strong enough to do for himself. She kept him apprised of the progress of the war. Taylor had returned to Monterrey and was apparently under orders to stay there.
In mid-March came reports of a Yankee landing just outside the Gulf port of Veracruz. The city was refusing American demands to surrender. Three weeks later she brought home the news that General Winfield Scott had bombarded Veracruz for three days and nights. The city had suffered terrible destruction before finally capitulating. Everyone was saying that Scott would now begin marching inland to the mountains and then on to Mexico City and there the war would be decided. And there were rumors now, she told him, lowering her voice as though she might be overheard in her own house and perhaps thought a traitor, that Santa Ana had lied about Angostura, that it had truly been no victory.
By the first days of April he was strong enough to walk and he took most of his meals outside in the flowered patio behind the house. Swallows came to water in the small fountain and he fed them crumbs of bread. Elena was a wonderful cook and even when he was not hungry he could not resist eating at least some of whatever she prepared for him. She got clothes for him and he put aside his uniform except for his boots. They took walks down to the nearby creek and had picnics in the shade of the alamo trees along the banks where dragonflies drifted drowsily on the air.
One sunny afternoon at the creek she asked him why he had turned against the United States and chosen to fight for Mexico. He smiled and said, “Because I wanted to fight for you.”
She blushed and lowered her eyes and said, “That is a pretty lie. You did not even know me then.”
And he said, “I knew you. I just didn’t know your name or where you were. I just hadn’t met you yet.” He wondered where these words had come from. He felt they were true but wondered if maybe his mind had come unsound. Yet he smiled at her and at himself because he didn’t care if he was crazy. If this was what it was to be mad, he thought, then damn him to hell, it’s mad he would be.
She looked at him closely, her bright black eyes roaming his face, her small smile sad in a way he couldn’t comprehend. But when he leaned to her she raised her face to receive the kiss.
He felt he was home.
But still he was visited by dreams of Daddyjack who often came to him in the black heart of the night and showed a yellow grin and fixed his burning red eye on him and said, “Ye aint deservin and ye know it. She dont know ye for what ye are.”
He’d wake sweatsoaked with Daddyjack’s laughter in his ears and Elena would hold him close and coo to him and tell him not to fear, that the war was far away. And slowly his heart would ease from its runaway gallop.
She brought news one day that Santa Ana had sent a portion of the army east to cut off the American advance from Veracruz. The San Patricios were said to be part of that force.
He was surprised by his indifference. The war had come to seem somehow unreal, something far away and unconnected to him anymore.
He walked up the hills every day and ate with appetite and felt himself growing stronger. One moonlit evening they went hand in hand to the main plaza and listened to the guitarists and drank lemonade and ignored the disapproving looks of the women in their rebozos and the priests in their black gowns. And on the way back home they stopped under a wide shade tree through which the moonlight dripped like honey and they kissed. And when they got home they made love and all the while he held her naked flesh to him and breathed the redolence of her smooth brown skin and soft black hair he could hear the whispered prayers of the old woman in the adjoining room.
One day in early May she came home with a fever. “I will be all right in a few days,” she said. “Many of the girls at the hospital get sick for a few days sometimes and then they are all right again. It is nothing serious, you will see.”
But the fever worsened in the night. She tossed and moaned and the sweat poured off her and soaked the sheet. She was on fire all next day and night but she smiled weakly and told him in a hoarse whisper she would be fine in another day, he’d see. He stayed at her side and bathed her forehead with cool water and sang softly to her.
On the third day the fever was raging. She soiled herself and wept with the shame of it. He cleansed her and kissed her and begged her to get well. But the fever rose still higher and she became delirious and could not hear him telling her he would care for her as she had cared for him, telling her how beautiful her eyes were and her breasts and how he adored the sound of her voice. He dozed periodically, woke each time with a start and clutched her to him the better to feel her heart beat against him.
And then the fourth dawn broke through the alamo trees and eased in the windows and he started awake from a hazy stifling dream that rang with mean echoing laughter and she was in his arms with her eyes wide and dried blood on her chin and she was dead.
There was an evening wake and ancient women in black rebozos wailed and prayed loudly without pause until he thought he would go mad from the monotony of it. The mother did go mad, now shrieking like a cat and throwing herself on her daughter’s bier, now pointing at him and screeching, “Tú! Tú eres la razón que ella está muerta! Tú, condenado gringo! Tú!”
In the morning she was buried and none among the mourners offered him a consoling word. Even in the graveyard some glared at him with open hatred.
He went directly from the funeral to a cantina and started drinking and did not stop until he passed out at a corner table. The barkeep knew him for a San Patricio and let him be. When he came to in the next forenoon he started right in drinking again. That night he ran out of money and so traded his tunic to the bartender for a bottle of tequlia. When that was gone he swapped his boots for two more bottles.
The next day he was arguing with the bartender about trading his trousers, which the bartender did not want, for another bottle when an army sergeant and two privates came in and told him he was under arrest. He broke a bottle over the sergeant’s head and gouged the jagged end into his face as he fell. The privates fell to clubbing him with their rifle butts but he twisted the weapon away from one of them and shattered the boy’s teeth with the butt plate and then whirled the rifle around and fired it point blank into the third soldier’s heart. The boy with the smashed mouth fled through the rear door.
He was having his second drink on the house when a half-dozen soldiers came through the door and the sergeant-at-arms pointed a pistol at him and told him to put his hands up or he would kill him.
John laughed at him and spat on the floor between them and hooked his thumbs in his belt and leaned back against the bar.
The sergeant cocked the pistol as the bartender lunged over the bar and cracked John on the back of the head with a sap fashioned of twenty silver pesos in a leather pouch and he crumpled insensate to the floor.
Four days later the back of his head was still tender. He was in a cell and awaiting court-martial on a charge of murder when Colonel Francisco Moreno, Captain John Riley, and Sergeant Lucas Malone showed up and presented the garrison commander with a paper signed by President Santa Ana himself. They were immediately escorted to his cell. They all looked worn and none was smiling. While John’s manacles were being removed Moreno him asked what happened.
John looked at him and shrugged. “Somebody got killed.”
“They said something about a girl.”
John looked away, then back at him. “There aint no girl.”
Moreno turned to Handsome Jack but he looked away. Riley seemed irritable, impatient. Moreno studied John for a long moment and then sighed and his air became professional. He informed him that Santa Ana had reorganized the San Patricios into an infantry battalion of two companies of one hundred men each and named it the Foreign Legion. Moreno himself was battalion commander and Riley and Saturnino O’Leary commanded the companies. Santa Ana wanted the unit up to full strength right away and was granting pardons to every jailed foreigner willing to fight under the San Patricio banner. More handbills were being smuggled into Yankee camps urging desertion to the Mexican side and there were reports that dozens of foreigners in Mexico City had enlisted in the Legion in the past few weeks.
“Scott’s pushing to Mexico City,” Riley said. He was nearly twitching with agitation. “Santa Ana’s pulling the whole army down there to make a stand of it. We got to get over there quick, man.” It took John a moment to realize he was pleased to see Jack Riley so apprehensive about his own future.
“I guess the sooner we get down there and kick Scott’s ass the sooner you get to be a general in this man’s army, eh Jack?”
Riley’s eyes narrowed. “Listen boy, I dont know what’s happened to ye here and I dont care a damn, not right now. We aint got the time for it, goddamnit. You rather stay here and be hanged for a murderer, just say so.”
Lucas Malone laughed tiredly and said, “Easy does er, boys. We all of us strung a bit tight just now. Come on, Johnny, let’s get on over to Mexico City. It’s nothin to do now but stick together and fight for our ownselfs.”
John let a heavy sigh. “Our ownselfs, Lucas? Hell man, who is that?”
“Dont play the fool with me, boy,” Lucas Malone said sternly. “Do it with Jack here all ye want but dont try it with me. Ye know damn good and well we of a kind—you and me and Jack here and all them other fellers in the compny who deserted the other side.”
“What the hell you mean ‘and Jack here’?” Riley said, but Lucas ignored him.
“Hell boy,” Lucas said, speaking more softly now, “you think you the only one feels pure-dee no-count and lost in the heart? The only one the good folk look at like it’s prison or the noose waitin for ye wherever ye go in this world?”
John looked at him.
“You know what the hell of it is, Johnny?” Lucas whispered.
And he realized that he did know, yes.
“The true and burnin hell of it is, the good folk’re right about us. We know they right. It be the drizzlin shits to know it. And it aint nothin to do about it but admit it and live with it the best we can.”
Riley hooted. Moreno gave them all a puzzled look.
“You’re so full of bullshit, Lucas,” Riley said. “Dont be including me in any such bunch of fools.” He looked from one to the other of them and suddenly laughed. “If you two think you aint but common jacklegs, that’s fine by me. Hell, it’s what I think of ye both meself—crazy jacklegs, truth be known. But as for me, well, I’m a right fella and I dont mind who knows it.”
John felt himself smiling. They were none of them anything for certain in the world but rogues, the lot of them, and their daddies all rogues before them.
He stood up and put on his hat. “Well hell, Lucas,” he said with mock seriousness, “I feel ever so much better by them words of wisdom. I must of been simple not to understood it before.”
“What ye mean, must of been?” Riley said. He nudged Lucas with an elbow and gestured at John. “Fella’s talking like simpleness is some past affliction rather than his natural condition.”
John grinned and said, “Piss upon you, Jack,” and threw a lazy punch that Riley easily slipped with a head roll.
Major Moreno looked on the three of them laughing and punching each other on the arms and shoulders and shook his head. And then laughed along with them. And said, “Vámonos! A la capital! Victoria o muerte!”
“Victoria o muerte!” cried Riley, making towards the door with a raised fist.
“I once knew a old gal named Victoria,” Lucas said as they trooped away. “Tits like a milk cow and a ass like a mule. But mean? Whooo! That woman’d just as soon kill you as kiss you, and you never did know which she was gonna try.”
“That aint the Victoria old Moreno’s talking about,” John said.
“Hell it aint,” said Handsome Jack.