Bad Apple

The Mexican asked for permission to gather his belongings, which Bowie denied. If he did not wish the man further harm, he did not want to make his passage to Mexico faster. Reaching a telegraph office, he could have sent news of the meeting and given troops an opportunity to run us down.

Because we did not immediately look in the back, I did not find the satchel until I went to look for food and water. By that time, the man was well away from there. The news Bowie read in the documents was disturbing, as you can imagine.

“I can get the guns to Caldwell,” Bowie said. “You have to take those papers to someone in the north who can relay them to the president. Let him know there are Judases in his midst.”

I agreed that the plan made sense. I did find fruit and a water pouch in the back. We swapped out the horse so Bowie could keep his, and went our separate ways. It had been an unexpected meeting those many days earlier and an unexpected parting. I did not doubt that I would see him again. What I did not expect was to very shortly run into Mexicans who were transporting a second wagonload of guns.

Mexicans who recognized the horse I rode.

I found this out because, spotting them as I came around a mesa, I sought to turn to the west to circle around their route. But the man who was hid in back fired—a shot that passed close enough for me to suspect it was an on-purpose miss.

I waited, hands extended at my sides, while they rolled the wagon over, the rifle on me for the duration. I was facing north-south, they was riding west. I knew that when they looked on that side of the horse, I was a dead man.

“¿Dónde obtuvo el caballo?” the driver asked.

“I do not understand,” I replied.

“Horse,” he said. “Where find?”

“Behind the mesa,” I replied. He didn’t seem to understand so I pointed.

“Lie!” the man shouted, and spoke to the man behind him. The gent with the rifle got out and came toward me like he was approaching a coiled snake. For all he knew I was some quick-draw gringo who shot their friend from his mount and stole it. That was a fair assumption, I supposed, given that there were two men and a cart unaccounted for.

I was not in a good spot. Even if I was a fast shot, which I wasn’t, the man with the gun was an intimidating, dangerous target. One who now motioned me to dismount with my arms raised.

I followed his instructions and he took my gun. The other man came over now and seized the reins of the horse.

Damnation, I thought. He didn’t want it to run when they shot me dead.

And shooting me dead definitely seemed to be the plan as he finally saw, and took, the satchel I’d hooked over the horn on the side facing away from his buckboard. He spit. He slapped me twice.

“Where Esteban?” he demanded.

“On my horse,” I replied truthfully.

“Where wagon?”

“Jim Bowie,” I answered.

The man laughed. He must have thought I was joking. He learnt I wasn’t when the top of his friend’s head came off and his body followed it to his right.

“Eh?” the man said, as the sound of the shot reached him. That was his last word as his back erupted in red and viscera as a bullet penetrated his chest. He fell back on his companion, twitching as he bled to death.

I looked toward where the shot had originated. Bowie was riding toward me from the direction of the mesa, the army rifle at his side.

“These guns are something,” he said as he rode up.

“I am very happy to see you,” I said. “What made you come back? The shot?”

Bowie shook his head and used the gun to point at the satchel, which lay in a puddle of blood. “Those papers,” he answered. “Said there was two wagons of guns. Since there were no tracks in the direction we come from, I figured you’d run into the other, so I tagged along.” He smiled with satisfaction. “More arms for the rebels.”

I was angry at him not having shared that information, but he later explained that if I knew he was there I might’ve looked back and spoilt the surprise attack.

All of what Bowie and I had discussed was important: the guns, the tactics, my mission. But what struck me hard when I finally rode off with the satchel wiped dry on the sand was this: in the space of an hour, I had watched three men die sudden, bloody, ugly deaths and it didn’t stick with me much more, or much longer, than a bugbite.

What the hell happened? I asked myself.

I decided I had left Ohio a pretty embittered fella and this—well, it took my mind off that stuff. I realized later it did more than that.

I left out one thing. There was a knife in the wagon and, after Bowie had ridden off with the buckboard and its contents, I used it to cut two shallow graves for these men. I put them inside and ate my second apple. Once again, I split the core and interred it with them, watering just that spot to give growth a fighting chance. I also kept the knife. It was wider and a little longer than Bowie’s pig-sticker, almost a machete. It didn’t have a sheath, so I wet it with drips from my waterskin and dropped dirt all over one side. Last thing I wanted was something shiny giving me away to anyone. I kept it in my belt, left side, so I could draw with my right.

I had been thrust into a war, and there was no avoiding that. But how to survive without become a monster who saw murder as sport? What had happened, I suspected, is that my two angel natures—growing and preaching—had conspired to transform John Apple into someone else.

Bowie had suggested I make for Coles Settlement. Said it would take four or five days and that John P. Coles would give me good advice on where to take our information. The man had settled there in ’24 and was a trusted confidant and ally of Bowie’s.

The journey was not without event. Comanche and Choctaw were not always reliable inhabitants of their own territory to the north, especially when they went tracking game to the south. Either the red men weren’t aware—or more likely, they did not care—that they had crossed into John Cameron’s Grant or the Immense Level Prairies. Some, I suspected, were just looking to pick a fight. I didn’t have much contact with Indians in Ohio, and none in Pennsylvania, but I could tell by the way they raced each other or charged one another like ancient knights, only these warriors were holding spears and aiming at handsome woven breast coverings with painted images of birds and buffalo. A few there were who saw me from afar and stopped. They did not appear at all fearful of discovery—who would I report them to?—but seemed to be considering whether to approach me; for trade, perhaps, or possibly to do harm. Especially the Comanche. Bowie had tales of their aggression against Whites, and against Choctaw for that matter. I was heading northeast, but if I saw other horses or clouds of dust, I turned either east or north to avoid them.

Except for one time when I came upon three Comanche, one of them on the ground, on his back, the other two huddled around him. It would have been easy to ride on, unseen, but I thought: if he’s hurt, I might be able to help. So I continued riding in their direction.

Turned out he wasn’t hurt. He was having his heart cut out by the other two. By the time one of the braves held it toward the skies, red and dripping gore, I was in easy smelling distance. They stood and turned and I froze where I was. I could see the dead Indian more clearly now, noticed his loincloth bloodied as well; later, Mr. Coles would explain that he had either stolen the squaw of one of them or defiled the daughter, for which disfigurement then death was the punishment. He would have been brought out here to die so his spirit would wander, lost, away from home.

I didn’t figure any of that, only knew it was none of my business. That, and the occupants of the three teepees I could see being set up some distance behind them. The redmen and whoever rode with them were going to make a party of this thing.

They made no immediate move against me so, raising my right hand—not both, like I was surrendering—I slowly turned and got back on course. The Indians did not follow. That was my first real exposure to the culture of Western savages, and though I later learned it had a more peaceable side, that first how-de-do stayed with me vividly for the rest of my ride. I have to confess, though I was revolted by what I had seen, there was something familiar about it—something Old Testament, Abrahamic, the Lord God who smiteth. Life is more memorably vivid than words, of course, but it got me to understand that some kinds of acts is universal.

I did not know it then but that realization would stick to me like skunk.

Another unusual encounter I had along the way was with a light-skinned colored man name of Samuel J. McCulloch. He was a free man, about twenty-five, tall, powerfully built, and as we were both lone travelers, and as I had an open heart to all people—except Comanche—we shared jerky and fruit over a campfire. He told me he was looking to join the fight against Santa Anna, and I informed him he was most certainly on the right heading. I instructed him how to get to Gonzales and, if he needed help with anything, to see Jim Bowie and tell him we met.

“I hear’d of him,” McCulloch told me. “The knife-fighter.”

“Invented his very own,” I said. “Big-un. Also cut a lot of trails in the wilderness.”

“Ev’body cuts trails,” McCulloch said.

I wasn’t sure I took his meaning, though as a Negro who was not enslaved, I suspected he meant that poetically, or some such. I had met Coloreds in the north, laborers and such, but this was the first Southern such man I had encountered. He was born in South Carolina, the belly of the South, to a white father who he moved with to Alabama.

“But light-skin, dark-skin, it don’t matter if y’aint white-skin,” he said, rubbing a bare arm. “Though I tell ya, I do get looks from the pure Black and the White, as if I wasn’t human. So I left the U.S. of America to come here with my wife and daughters and son and sisters. I lef’ them all on the Lavaca to come here.”

I didn’t know what the Lavaca was, and he told me it is well southeast of where we sat, a river that empties into a bay that empties into the gulf. He’d come from where I had been headed. Odd world.

“It’s a river, a land, worth owning and fighting for,” he added.

“That the only reason you come?” I asked.

He looked indignant by the campfire, as though I was questioning his integrity, then broke open a big smile.

“No suh,” he said in a syrupy accept. “No. My boy is little an’ I needed to get me around some menfolk for a spell. I was gettin’ pecked to death by my women.”

Come morning I wished Samuel J. McCulloch God’s blessing, told him to watch out for Comanche, and said I expected I’d see him again when I rejoined Bowie.

He laughed. “It’s a big country, brother Apple, but folks have away of running into each other in it.”

The rest of the ride was without incident except for a gully washer that poured down like God’s own wrath. I never saw nor felt nor heard rain so determined to scar and reshape the land. It hit so hard and heavy I had to pull under a ledge and wait, then hoped the ledge didn’t fall because so many pebbles and chips broke off and became little bullets themselves. I had heard tell of winds that tore so hard across the land that they ripped up trees and carried them away. I did not see such as that, but I heard a roar and I heard thunder that made me afraid in a way that stripped civilization from me and left me feeling as naked and unsheltered as the redskins. When it was over, the ground was mud and my precious papers were soaked around the edges—both requiring a pause to let the hot, welcome sun dry them out.

I arrived at my destination stiff and tired. Stiff from the rain that hardened my clothes, tired because you don’t sleep in the open the way you sleep in a camp. At any kind of settlement, there are men who are awake and usually drinking, or sentries. Alone in the open, you are always listening—for hungry cats or bears, for Comanche, for escaped prisoners who parted from jail with just their trousers.

I covered the last few miles on the fifth morning of my trip with the help of smoke rising from a hearth. I smelt it before I saw it. The house it issued from was long and low and built from a mix of cedar timber and stone. The storm must have hit here too, because there were several downed trees that were in the process of being chopped to firewood. It broke my heart to see them uprooted and I resolved, before leaving, to see if there was some way I could help plant new ones. My ma had always said, when I was a boy, to leave a place better than when I arrived. I never really saw how that was possible, lest you were a saint, till now.

John P. Coles and family could not have been more welcoming, once I told them who I was from, and the two workingmen lowered the big tree-chopping axes they’d raised in my direction. The master himself came out to greet me.

“Please forgive the manners of Amos—that’s the big fella—and Jacobus,” Mr. Coles said. “Even though they’re cutting wood for what will be, in a short while, I hope, a rooming house for travelers, the two bears have not learned that we have to welcome our guests, not menace them!”

The last part he said to them, or rather at them; not in a way to make them take offense, since he did it with a twinkle, but to educate them.

I put the gentleman with his white shirt and vest bulging at the belly to be in his middle forties. He walked taller than his middle five-feet height, his balding head aglow in the sun. His wife Mary Eleanor did not walk behind but beside him. She stood a half-head taller and had a welcoming, wide-open face. There was, then, a son and two daughters. From the look of Mary Eleanor, more was on the way. Also milling about were a clutch of servants and folks I later learned were slaves; after my meeting with Samuel J. McCulloch I felt bad to know that these people was “owned,” as Mr. Coles later put it. But they seemed healthier, in fact, than McCulloch and I left the right-or-wrong of things to the Lord God to judge.

But I get ahead of my narration.

I was taken by the arm by Mr. Coles and walked inside. He was not only friendly, he was curious. Seeing that I was older, and hearing where I was from before Texas, he had nothing but questions. In what I later learned was a North Carolina accent that I couldn’t tell apart from McCulloch’s South Carolina one, Mr. Coles asked about Bowie. He did this eagerly, persistently, while I washed my face and chest and arms and feet at an outdoor basin, which had its own pump and plentiful water. He seemed downright euphoric—his wife provided that word later, over griddle cakes and eggs—to learn that the rumors of the cannon and the victory at Gonzales were true.

“You fought in that historic stand?” he asked.

“I was there with a gun,” I admitted. “Not sure what that I hit anything. Jim Bowie and James Fannin and the others—they are the real Texians. I just happened.”

He pumped my hand anyway. “A man from outside who takes on the commitment of others,” he cheered. “Nothing greater! Nothing!”

I felt a little embarrassed by his “euphoric” enthusiasm. If Jim Bowie had not been drunk on a stoop, I’d be at the Gulf of Mexico, fishing.

“A new nation,” my host said. “Andy Jackson wanted us. Santa Anna wants us. But we got us!” He added with a shout: “Independence!”

It wasn’t until he walked me inside that I got around to showing him what I came with, the papers of passage. Well, I never saw a man’s mood turn so quick and fully. He excused himself to another room, taking the papers with him and shutting the door behind him. Mrs. Coles excused herself, then, to give the young children their schooling, and I sat alone at a lovely-set table with second helpings and no real idea of what was coming next.

Until the housekeeper showed up.