THEY LIVED THREE weeks in the Tonkawa village on the west bank of the Brazos River. The river was dark green and full of fish, and the canebrakes along the banks were ten feet high and so thick that a rifle ball couldn’t pass through them. Each evening the winter sky was lighted with sunsets of scarlet and turquoise and pink clouds, and in the morning the mist hung on the river and in the cane and the sun burned through it like a slow orange flame. The Tonkawas were a strange people who lived in conical thatched huts and married their in-laws, and neither Son nor Hugh could ever figure out their family relationships. The women covered their breasts with circles of yellow and black paint, and there was one large hut where they were forced to go during their menstrual cycle.
Sana found two of her uncles and three cousins in the village, and she spent most of her time with them, but each night she went with Son to gig bullfrogs by the light of a Mexican angle lamp along the riverbank or string trot lines through the cattails. But he also knew she was gradually becoming one of her people again. On the third night he could tell she had painted her breasts, and she wore a coup feather tied to the end of her long black hair.
“I didn’t think you was supposed to wear one of those unless you killed somebody,” he said.
“I kill a Comanche when I was fourteen,” she said. “He and two others try to take my mother.”
Then sometimes in the stillness of cicadas she would squeeze his arm, kiss him on the neck and cheek, and whisper to him in her own language. She wore a string of blue morning glories on her shirt, and her black hair shone in the light from the angle lamp.
“What’s that mean?” he said after the first time she did it.
“I not tell you.”
“What kind of dumb game is that? I could say things you don’t understand.”
“What?” she said, smiling, her brown eyes moving over his face.
“A lot of things people say back in Tennessee.”
“You such strange, nice boy. One day Indian teach you how to laugh. But you nice boy, anyway.”
On a late wind-burned afternoon three Tonkawa hunters rode back into camp with their horses spent. The lead rider slipped off his horse without bothering to untie the bloodied and stiffened doe from the withers, and went directly into the chief’s hut. A few minutes later the rider, the chief, and Sana found Son and Hugh fishing with throw lines on the edge of the canebrake.
“You all sounded like a buffalo coming through that cane,” Hugh said.
“You leave, quick,” Sana said.
“What is it?” Son said.
The chief and the hunter began to speak at once. The insides of the hunter’s buckskin breeches were still wet with horse lather.
“He says many Mexicans and some strange Americans stop him earlier. He think they look for you,” Sana said.
“Ask him about these Americans,” Hugh said.
She spoke rapidly to the hunter, and he began to gesture in the air with his hands.
“He says they Americans who talk different and wear tall hats. They tell him they looking for two murderers. One is an old man with a big eye, and the other a tall boy with blond hair.”
“Back in the shithouse again,” Hugh said.
“How’d they get the Mexicans with them?” Son said.
“You remember that little horse raid we made with Iron Jacket? Them Mexicans ain’t dumb. They know them and Landry want the same two skinned asses tacked up on a tree.”
“Ask him how far away they are,” Son said.
The hunter understood and pointed at the sun and motioned twice at the air with his cupped hand.
“He says they be here soon after the ducks fly down on the river,” Sana said.
“Shit, that gives us till about a half hour after sunset. Let’s pack it and haul ass,” Hugh said.
“Where?”
“We go west, then head south behind them. This time we don’t stop till we find Sam Houston’s army. We could use a lot of company if Landry’s got the Mexicans riding with him.”
They walked back through the canebrake in the fading light, loaded their guns, saddled their horses, and stuffed one canvas bag from Tyler’s full of smoked fish and venison. The sun had become a small crack of fire in the violet clouds on the horizon when they rolled their second change of clothes in their blankets and tied them on the backs of their saddles.
“You do what Hugh tell you. Stay with the Americans till those bad men go away,” Sana said.
“I’ll be back after we get finished soldiering. If this war comes out right, I’ll have six hundred and forty acres of land, too,” Son said.
“You not come back.”
“I sure will.”
“You change when you go away. You be like other Americans. It not bad.”
“Hell, I’m not like other Americans. I’m a convict. I ain’t got no more in common with the Americans you’ve knowed than them Frenchies that’s chasing us.”
“You want to set here and talk some more, or just invite the Mexicans to hang us up on their pig stickers?” Hugh said.
They rode in a gallop toward the low brown hills west of the village, and by the time they reached the first rise, great flocks of mallards and teal were winnowing across the sky and breaking formation to land on the river. The land was awash with the sun’s red afterglow, and in the distance to the south they could make out two long black lines of riders.
“Stop it in them oaks over the top,” Hugh called over his shoulder.
“We better pour it on while we got the chance.”
“I don’t think they seen us in all this shadow, but they will for sure when we come off the other side.” They made the top of the hill and rode into the trees. Hugh got down from his horse and tethered it to an oak limb. He squatted in the grass at the edge of the trees and stared back down the river at the column of riders.
“You got better eyes than me. Can you make out them men in front?” he said.
“No.”
“They ain’t army.”
“I’m for hitting it, Hugh.”
“Look behind you. There must be five miles of open country out yonder. Give it another ten minutes and we’ll be gone into the dark like a couple of owls.”
They watched the column turn into the village and the Tonkawas begin coming out of the circle of huts. The last of the twilight’s shadows seemed to gather into the earth, and the wind blew off the river and rattled through the canebrake.
“Somebody’s starting a fire down there,” Son said.
“They’re probably going to pass some whiskey around till somebody gets drunk enough to tell them where we’re at. There’s always two or three that’ll skin out a bunkie when their grog starts to run short.”
They saw a small flame glow on the ground in the middle of the village, then the fire leaped higher in the wind and silhouetted the two men throwing dried brush into it. The flames cracked upward in a spray of yellow sparks and burned away the shadows back to the ring of huts.
“Look in front of the fire. It’s him,” Son said.
“It sure is. Or one just like him. No other man in Texas would wear pantaloons and a tall hat like that.”
“I don’t know why, but I feel funny looking at him.”
“He ain’t exactly the person you was most wanting to see.”
“No. It’s different. I don’t know how to say it. It’s almost like I feel scared.”
“You’re seeing yourself back in prison again. Forget it. We ain’t never going back there.”
“You was right about the whiskey. That mule must have four or five kegs slung on it.”
“In a half hour that camp is going to be like a crazy house. Out on the plains I seen them trade off everything they owned to keep the spigot open.”
“You reckon they’ll find out about Sana?”
“I doubt it. Even a drunk Indian knows what’ll happen to him if he turns against his own kind.”
“What?”
“They drive them out of the tribe. It’s like they don’t exist no more. It’s the worst thing that can happen to them. Come on, let’s lead our mounts down the other side of the hill and then cut southwest toward the Colorado. Sam Houston’s over in that country somewheres.”
Son continued to stare down the incline. Hugh pushed him in the rump with his boot.
“Let’s get moving. Stop worrying about her. She’s a smart girl. She ain’t going to get herself caught.”
“We should have taken her with us.”
“Sometimes you can’t do everything right, boy. She understands that. You ought to learn it, too. But if you really want to, you can send a ball down there in the middle of them. Then they’ll blow us into chicken guts and you won’t have these problems no more.”
“All right, let’s get out of here. You think they can cut our trail in the dark?”
“Maybe. But once we get to the hill country they ain’t going to have no trail to follow. The best tracker I ever knowed couldn’t follow deer sign through them rocks and hollows. Some of them stretches down by the Colorado ain’t got enough dirt for a lizard to dig a hole and fart in.”
They led their horses off the back side of the hill in the dark, and when they reached the tall buffalo grass in the field they mounted and rode toward the evening star that lay like a cold diamond on the horizon.
At sunrise they came out of a woods onto a large farm with rick fences bordering the fields and a smooth road that led back to a rambling house set among chinaberry and live oak trees. The blacks were already at work in the fields, clearing stumps with mules and burning them in huge trash fires. The house was painted white and had a breezeway through the center and a verandah that ran all the way around the building. In back were the barns and a dozen split-log slave cabins placed so neatly in a row that an arrow could fly the entire length of the front porches without touching a post. The blacks and mules moved about in the mist and the smoke of the trash fires like silent half-formed creatures.
“I bet we’re going to meet a white man that gets the most out of his darkies,” Hugh said.
Son felt a strange sense of discomfort when they rode their horses at a walk down the lane toward the house. It was the same feeling he’d had when he’d entered a public house for the first time in New Orleans and had been told by a slave to go around to the side door.
“I reckon that’s the overseer,” Hugh said. “Them kind sure look all alike, don’t they? One step above the niggers and about five down from any other white man.”
The overseer was a sallow man on horseback in a straw hat and wool coat with his trousers tucked inside his muddy boots. He rested a cup of coffee on the pommel of his saddle.
“Hello!” Hugh called.
The man nodded without replying.
“We need some directions and some breakfast if you got it,” Hugh said.
“We got food in the poke,” Son whispered.
“We ain’t got coffee and eggs and fatside.”
“Where you wanting to go?” the overseer said, his face a mixture of distrust and dislike.
“Well, that’s the problem. We ain’t quite sure,” Hugh said. “Can you give us breakfast? We got the money to pay for it.”
“You don’t pay no money on Mr. Reilly’s place. Ride your horses around by the back porch.”
“We thank you,” Hugh said.
“Tell him to stick his back porch up his butt hole,” Son said.
“What do you expect?” Hugh said. “You want a uniformed nigger to serve us on silver plate out on the verandah? Besides, the smokehouse is in back.”
They walked their horses through the live oaks and chinaberry trees around the side of the house. Wooden flower boxes were nailed below the shuttered windows. A terraced rose garden shored up with large rocks sloped down to a creek that was lined with willow trees and wild fern. Directly behind the back verandah was a log smokehouse, and they could smell the sides of salted pork dripping into the ash. A moment later a black man wearing a brushed coat and trousers and a shirt with a collar came out on the verandah and set a fire-blackened coffeepot and two cups on the table.
“You gentlemens set down. I’ll bring your breakfast directly, and Mr. Reilly will give you your directions,” he said, and disappeared through the door again.
“You ever seen a darky like that outside of New Orleans?” Son said.
“They got them like that in Natchez. They even teach them how to read and write so they can do the marketing.”
“There’s something about this place that just don’t hit my nose right.”
“You’re still remembering what them French gentlemen done to you in the courtroom,” Hugh said.
“That ain’t it. Figure it this way. Ever since we come across the Sabine we ain’t seen nobody with money like this. Any farms we run across was about forty acres of scrub land with one plow mule on it. How do you reckon this Reilly fellow keeps ahold of a place like this?”
“That is something to study on.”
“You damn right it is.”
The black man came through the door with a tray of grits, fried fatback, and scrambled eggs between his hands. Before the door could swing shut on the counter weight, he caught it with his shoulder for his owner to walk through. The white man was tall with an angular face and a beard that was squared below the jaw. He wore a shawl under his housecoat, and a large ring of keys hung from his belt. He looked as though he had been caught between undressing from the night and preparing for his day as proprietor of something very large and solid and his.
“How can I be of service to you gentlemen?” he said.
They were both surprised at his Irish accent.
“We was riding all night and didn’t feel like another cold breakfast and thought we might take advantage of your kindness,” Hugh said. “Besides, the trace petered out in them woods back there, and we got a little bit lost.”
“My overseer said you weren’t quite sure where you were going.”
“We’re headed down toward the Colorado and maybe over to the Guadalupe eventually,” Hugh said, and tore at a piece of fatback with his teeth.
“You won’t have any trouble, then. You’ll catch the trace again just west of my property, and you just stay in a southwesterly direction.”
“I figured it was kind of a dumb question to ask,” Hugh said. “But you can’t ever tell what’s waiting for you down the pike these days.”
“How’s that?” Mr. Reilly said.
“With the Mexicans and the Texians shooting at each other and a lot of crazy men waiting to rob you at every turn in the woods,” Hugh said.
“You seem well-armed enough to take care of yourself. Is that the Colt’s revolver I’ve been hearing about?”
“Yes, sir, it is. I can get off five balls with it and draw blood faster than a chicken getting pecked to death. Jack Tyler over by the Trinity give it to me. You ever heered of him?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know him,” Mr. Reilly said. “If you think you know your way now, I’ll be about my chores.”
“We was looking for somebody in particular down on the Colorado,” Hugh said.
“Hugh,” Son said.
“I wondered if you might know where Sam Houston is at these days,” Hugh said. His walleye was lighted with delight.
“Why would you want to find Sam Houston?”
“We’re fixing to join up with him.”
“You’re insurrectionists, are you?”
“From what I hear it ain’t no insurrection,” Hugh said. “The Mexicans been throwing Texians into jails for fifteen years. Back in Kentucky we wouldn’t have put up with that shit for more time than it takes to load a rifle. We’d fry Santa Anna in his own grease.”
“Leave as soon as you finish your breakfast.”
“I never knowed no Irishman to side with a tyrant, mister,” Hugh said. “You must be a different breed from the ones I fought alongside with at Chalmette.”
“You finish and get out.”
Hugh chewed a large piece of fatback in his mouth and spit it into his plate.
“We done finished, mister,” he said. “And before you walk away sniffing at the air like there’s a bad smell in it, think about what it’s going to be like if Sam Houston and Jim Bowie win this thing. My point is a fellow in a pretty shawl and dress like that ought not to be flinging his slop jar into the wind.”
They rode laughing down the front road between the sunlit fields, the wind in their faces, while the overseer and the slaves pulling stumps stared after them curiously.
They wandered for weeks through the hill country of south central Texas, across the Colorado and the Guadalupe and over toward San Antonio de Bexar, then south on the Guadalupe again. The rolling hills and steep cliffs were the largest Son had seen since he left Tennessee. The pebble-bottomed streams were a clear green, and the banks were covered with cottonwoods and willows. Sometimes when they rode along a natural fault where they could see miles of the country at once, his head would swim with the enormous breadth and diversity of the horizon. The rocky ground was dotted with live oaks and blackjack and mesquite trees, and there were chains of lakes that sloped away toward another wide green river that cut its way through canyon walls that a ground squirrel couldn’t climb.
Once they got within twenty miles of Bexar and were told that Ben Milam’s men had taken the town for the Texians, although a ball had been driven through Milam’s brain on the third day of the battle. They almost decided to ride into the town because Hugh thought James Bowie was there, but they still had a terrible question mark left from the slave hunter’s story about Emile Landry’s promise to pay a reward in Bexar.
They found Sam Houston and his army outside of Gonzales on the Guadalupe River. It was mid-morning and raining hard, and they saw the tents and lean-to shelters spread through a piney woods. The rain was sluicing off their hat brims and driving into their faces as they tried to focus through the gray light on the woods and estimate the number of men camped there.
“It sure don’t look like a lot,” Hugh said.
“You reckon that’s just part of it?” Son said.
“I hope so, because I wouldn’t want to be here if Santa Anna come marching with a thousand or so Mexicans up the pike.”
“Stand and say who you are, mister,” a picket called out from the edge of the trees.
“They sure don’t put their pickets out too far,” Hugh said.
“You better sing the right song, mister, or I’m going to put a ball through your eye,” the picket yelled.
“Who the hell do we look like, the king and queen of England?” Hugh shouted.
There was no response from the woods, and in the waving sheets of rain they still couldn’t make out where the voice had come from. Son stood forward in his stirrups and cupped his hands over his mouth.
“We want to join up with you. We got our own guns and grub,” he said.
“Ride in,” the picket replied.
“They’re a choicy bunch of sonsofbitches, ain’t they?” Hugh said.
“Take it easy today, Hugh. Don’t see how many people you can get mad at us our first day in the army.”
“They’re damn glad to have us, boy, and don’t forget it. I bet there ain’t hardly any of these men that knows anything about soldiering. I learned more against the redcoats at Chalmette than this bunch could put together between them.”
They rode into the shelter of the trees and saw the picket walk out from behind a short earthen works shored up with sawed pine logs. He wore deerskin clothes, Indian moccasins, and a flop hat, and carried a Kentucky rifle in his hands. His eyes were like agate as he looked at them.
“Where you come from?” he said.
“We been up on the Brazos with the Indians a bit, and then we wandered all over the hill country looking for you all,” Hugh said. “I never seen an army that could lose itself so well.”
“I don’t mean that. Where you come from?” the picket asked.
“Kentucky and Tennessee,” Son said. “What the hell difference does it make?”
“You seen any Mexicans?”
“Just get your thumb off the hammer a minute and we’ll tell you,” Hugh said.
“We ain’t seen none since we left the Brazos,” Son said.
“You see that wide tent yonder?” the picket said. “Take your horses over there and don’t get down till I tell you.”
“We went to a lot of trouble to find you, and we ain’t in the mood for playing no games out in a wet woods,” Hugh said.
“General Houston don’t let nobody sign up till he talks with them first,” the picket said.
They walked their horses over the thick layer of pine needles on the forest floor. Dripping tree limbs swung back against their faces, and unshaved soldiers in buckskin and homespun clothes looked out at them from the gloom of their tents and lean-tos. The smoke from the few camp fires flattened in the drizzle through the trees and hung low on the ground. The picket walked to the flap of the wide tent that was hung on two ropes crisscrossed between four pine trunks.
“General, this is Corporal Burnett. There’s two fellows out here that say they’re from Tennessee and Kentucky and want to join up.”
“Send them in, please.”
“Yes, sir.” The picket untied the leather thong from the tent pole and pulled back the flap, then looked up into the rain. “You all go in.”
Son and Hugh got down from their horses and stepped inside the warmth and dryness of the tent. Sam Houston sat behind a table made from a half dozen board planks nailed across the tops of two pine stumps. His hair was grown down on his shoulders and hung in curls on his brow; because of his narrow shoulders and the lack of color in his thin lips he looked almost effeminate to Son at first glance, until Son looked again at the wide forehead and the deep-set eyes that were either hazel or gray (he couldn’t tell which) and stared at him as steadily as a cocked musket. He wore a navy coat with large buttons on each side of the front, and a blanket was draped around the back of his chair. A pewter container of ink with a stained quill in it was set on top of an unfinished letter in front of him. In the moment’s hush after the picket had fastened the flap behind him, Son felt not only his own but also Hugh’s sudden lack of preparation in front of this very different man.
“I understand you gentlemen want to join the army,” Houston said. The voice was Tennessee, from the mountains, with the soft and deceptive inflection of the Cumberland men whom Son and Hugh had known all their lives.
“Yes, sir, General,” Hugh said. “We been hunting you all over God’s green earth. We done give up when somebody told us you was right outside Gonzales.”
“Why do you want to join the army?” The eyes never blinked with the question, as though it were something very natural to ask with the rain ticking on the canvas roof like a bad watch running out of time.
“The way things are now, you either got to get in the army or have the Mexicans shooting at you half the time, anyway,” Hugh said.
Son looked directly at the general’s eyes and saw that the words never touched inside. “We heered you was giving six hundred and forty acres to any soldier that would stick it out to the end,” he said.
“You can get more than that from the Mexicans just by signing an oath of allegiance to Mexico City,” Houston said.
“We wouldn’t do nothing like that,” Hugh said. “I fought under Andy Jackson at New Orleans, just like you done at Horseshoe Bend. We wouldn’t never support no tyrant like Santa Anna.”
“I see you have one of Sam Colt’s revolvers. How do you like it?” The voice was disarming, a relaxation like a flame being taken away from wax.
“It’s a hell of a pistol, General. When I traded for it over at Jack Tyler’s I thought I’d be safer in front of it than behind it because everything Jack trades is junk. His beer is so bad you just as lief pour it on the ground without bothering to run it through your pipes.” Hugh’s words were coming too fast, and there was a fine wire of strain in his voice. Son couldn’t believe it. “Then my partner and me got jumped by three slave hunters this side of the Trinity, and I snapped off two shots at them fellows before they—”
“One of my officers, Sam Walker, has a Colt. I wish I had a few more of them. Why did these slave hunters jump you?”
Hugh looked blankly back at him and fingered the damp edge of his coat.
“They was fixing to rob us,” he said.
“It’s strange that three slave hunters would attack two armed white men when they could make more profit and have less trouble with runaway Negroes.”
“General, them men was after us because we’re escaped convicts from Louisiana,” Son said. “We killed a guard over there, and his brother has got two hundred dollars on each of our heads. He’s been running us all over Texas, and he liked to got us a few weeks back on the Brazos. He had a bunch of Mexicans with him, too, because we raided a Mexican horse pen with the Indians just after we come across the Sabine.”
“Did you have to kill that guard?”
“I can’t answer that one too good to myself,” Son said.
“How well do you shoot that Kentucky?” Houston asked.
“As good as the next man. We ain’t gone hungry for camp meat with it.”
“What else have you done with it?”
“Sir?”
“You didn’t kill that guard in Louisiana with it. Can you kill a Mexican with it?”
“I dropped one of them slave hunters, General.”
Houston picked up a carpet bag from under the table and took out two printed enlistment forms. They were worded in the grandiloquent language of a man who had memorized hundreds of passages from the Iliad and Odysseey while living among the Cherokees:
TEXAS FOREVER
We pledge to rally to the standard against the usurper of the South and all those who deny the rights of freeborn men. With valor and our faith in God we will not desist until the violators of our homes and farms are driven forever from the soil of the Republic. The justice of our cause will be evidenced by the gallantry and spirit with which we serve it. Our birthright and country will be maintained, or we will perish in defense of it.
___________________
His signature or mark
Hugh made his mark on the line, and Son labored carefully with the quill until he had drawn his full name.
“When do we start kicking some Mexican butt, General?” Hugh said.
“That depends on many things, gentlemen. But now you should go back with Corporal Burnett and build a lean-to for yourselves,” he said.
“Sir, one other thing. Do you know where Jim Bowie is at?” Hugh said.
“He’s in Bexar. Do you know him?”
“Hell, yes. We drunk and played cards together many a time in New Orleans.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He’s meaner than piss boiling in a pot when he’s mad. I seen him tear up a public house once after somebody stole his purse. He run eight men through a window before he found the one that done it.”
Houston laughed out loud.
“That sounds very much like Jim in his cups,” Houston said. “I’m very glad to have you gentlemen on our side.”
He said it with genuine warmth, and both Hugh and Son pulled back their shoulders just a little.
For the next two months their life in the army involved almost everything in a soldier’s experience except fighting a war. They sawed firewood and hauled water, built earthen works, dug latrines and filled them in again. Each morning after muster they marched four hours back and forth in the open field next to the woods and practiced firing in staggered volley lines, snapping their hammers on empty flash pans and cap holes and aiming at a distant grove of live oaks. The ennui became contagious among them. Half the time they were not listening when their noncommissioned officers shouted drill instructions at them, and they stepped on each other’s heels and collided into the man in front when someone didn’t hear the order to halt. The idea of taking orders from men like themselves was a contradiction in their minds, a violation of the politics that brought them into the army in the first place: to rid their community of a tyrannical authority that made their lives wretched.
Also, the noncommissioned officers had little if any more experience in the army than the enlisted men. Often they argued among themselves in front of their men and sometimes devised training plans that turned into a carnival at their own expense, such as the time that Corporal Burnett sent forty men on a wide circle through a woods and forgot to tell them what to do when they got there. When he found them that afternoon half of them were drunk and sick on green tequila they had bought off a traveling Mexican liquor supplier.
Of the enlisted men who talked back to the noncommissioned officers and complained incessantly, Hugh was the worst. He yawned loudly and belched during muster, drove the wood wagon over a corporal’s foot, shot at a deer when he was standing picket and aroused the whole camp, got drunk whenever he could buy tequila, broke wind deliberately while at attention, and always offered advice about a better way to do something. One morning during drill Corporal Burnett had them form into a defensive square in the middle of the field and kneel in a firing position.
“All right, this is what is called the ‘British square,’ ” he said. “You use it when you get caught out in the open and you ain’t got no cover. As long as you hold the square nobody can fire on your back or your flank.”
“It’s real good for keeping everybody in one place so a cannon ball can wipe out half of them, too,” Hugh said.
“What?”
“When we pushed the redcoats back to the Gulf at Chalmette, they went into squares all over the field. Our eight-pounders blowed guts and brains into the tops of the trees. I think they done the same thing in the Revolution, too.”
“You start tonight on another latrine, Allison.”
“I’m just telling you and these other boys what that square’s worth. You try to fight the Mexicans anywhere in the open and they’ll shove that musket up your butt sideways. General Sam knows that. Why the hell you think we cut bait anytime there’s Mexicans a day’s ride away? This war ain’t going to get won fighting like no redcoats.”
The corporal was furious, but he couldn’t argue with Hugh’s experience, and he also knew that the general had no plans to engage the enemy in any kind of open, or worse, enclave situation.
“Fall out, Allison, and get started on that latrine now,” he said. “When I get back to camp I’m going to see if I can’t do something permanent about you.”
“Like what?” Hugh said, taking a twist of tobacco from his pocket.
“Like getting your ass out of this army.”
“I’ll be here when we pop our first caps on them Mexicans. When that time comes, you just stay behind me and find out how it’s done.” He balanced his rifle on his shoulder, holding the barrel in the crook of his arm, and walked back toward the woods to begin digging another latrine.
ONE MORNING ERASTUS Deaf Smith needed three men to go with him to Bexar and deliver a message to James Bowie and pick up a wagon load of powder, caps, flints, and lead bars for shot. Smith was Houston’s scout, without rank or title except “scout,” and he looked as though he had been hammered together out of pig iron. Any movement of his thick body made the muscles tighten against his buckskin clothes, and his broad face and wide-set eyes had the resolution of a skillet. A fever had destroyed most of his hearing when he was a child, and he talked in a quacking voice as he tried to imitate what he thought words should sound like. But he read lips, in both English and Spanish, he could see a deer flash through a dappled woods a half mile away, and sometimes he would suddenly rein his horse to a stop, dismount and stand silently for a moment, then point in the direction of approaching riders just before they came into sight. He was absolutely without fear and the only man in the Texas army whom Houston trusted completely.
Every soldier within earshot of his quacking voice volunteered for the trip to Bexar. Corporal Burnett appointed himself as an accepted volunteer, then Hugh pushed through the others and stood directly in front of Smith so his lips could be read.
“That’s me and Son Holland, Deaf,” he said. “I know Jim Bowie. He ain’t going to be able to read General Sam’s letter unless I get him sober first. I ain’t sure that drunk sonofabitch can read, anyway. I’ll probably have to do it for him.”
“Hold it,” Corporal Burnett said.
“Deaf don’t take no orders from you. Ain’t that right, Deaf? The general told you to pick out some good men, and you got them right here.”
“You can’t drink with Bowie in Bexar,” Smith said.
“You ever seen me drunk?” Hugh said. “I ain’t like these others. I wouldn’t touch that green Mexican piss they drink.”
“You’re supposed to be cutting wood today, Allison,” Corporal Burnett said.
“I done that last night while you was sleeping on picket. How about it, Deaf? I really want to see Jim again.”
“Take two powder horns each,” Smith said. “Tell the cook to give you beef in your ration and none of that salted pork. Get gum coats from somebody if you ain’t got them. It’s going to be stringing frogs by this afternoon.”
The sky was blue with only a few pink clouds on the horizon.
“If that’s what you say, Deaf. We ain’t going to be but a minute.”
Hugh crawled inside his and Son’s lean-to, stuck the Colt’s revolver inside his belt, handed Son his rifle, and stooped back into the light with his short-barrel musket in one hand and his sailcloth sack with the sewed tie string in the other. They started walking toward the cooking area in the center of the woods. Hugh’s walleye was as bright as a black marble. “You ain’t thinking right, Hugh,” Son said. “Maybe Landry or some of them other Frenchies are still there.”
“I don’t give a shit if they are. I can’t take no more of this hiding in a rat hole.”
“You was talking about not being foolish, and now you’re ready to put our balls on a stump just to get away from camp for a few days.”
“Ben Milam took that town for the Texians. We’re in the Texian Army, ain’t we? And Jim Bowie’s there. He’d hack that mulatto’s head off if they tried to put manacles on us.”
“You ain’t thinking about the two-hundred-dollar bounty that Landry probably promised every piece of white trash in Bexar, either,” Son said.
“They’ll have to take on Jim, too, if they’re going to get it. And there ain’t no white man that stupid.”
“Hugh, you just ain’t using your head like you usually do. Maybe if we don’t do nothing dumb now, we’ll be out of all that trouble back in Louisiana.”
“You make your own selections. I’m going to see Jim, I’m going to get drunk with him, and I’m going to forget all them latrines I dug because a corporal with pap still on his mouth told me to do it.”
“That ain’t what you told Deaf.”
“You don’t ever learn nothing, do you? Deaf wants you and me because we got these leg-iron scars on our ankles. We ain’t going to desert and ride down the pike to find a better deal with a dumb ass like James Fannin, and we ain’t going to shoot off our mouth to no Mexican spy in a saloon or jenny-barn. He wouldn’t take nobody with him unless they was the best, and I got a feeling that General Sam already told him me and you was going.”
They stood by the large Dutch oven built of field stones, where the cooks were frying salted pork and boiling a gruel made of cracked corn and molasses in an iron pot. The cooks were a filthy lot, their faces and beards blackened by soot, and Son had heard that two of them had the clap.
Hugh handed one of them his sailcloth sack.
“We’re going out with Deaf this morning. He says to fill it up with beef and any pickled tomatoes and melon you got.”
“You want what?” the cook said, staring back with his grimy face above the smoke.
“Deaf don’t want no salted pork. That’s clear enough, ain’t it? Just give us some of that smoked beef and any pickled tomatoes or melon that you ain’t ate yourself.”
“Allison, you lying sonofabitch, you tried this on me before. You get out of my kitchen or I’ll give you another eye that looks like that ugly one you already got.” The cook had a long pine branch in his hand that he had been using to stoke the fire.
“Maybe you better go back and talk with Deaf about it, cook,” Son said. “There he is over by General Sam’s tent. Lookie there, Sam’s coming out the flap now.”
“I wish somebody would tell me what the hell is going on around here,” the cook said, opening the tie string on Hugh’s sack. “I have to feed all you miserable sonsofbitches, and you don’t give me nothing in turn except trouble and some half-ass story about you got to go off with Deaf. Nobody told me a damn thing about it. If you can’t shit in the morning, you blame it on me. If it runs down your leg, you blame it on me, too. Now Deaf sends you in here for what little preserves I got left to keep you all from getting scurvy, and somebody’s going to be bitching about that, too. You take this, Allison, and tell that stupid sonofabitch Deaf to learn how to use the human language so this camp don’t turn into one big latrine.”
It started raining hard that afternoon, and they were still five miles from Bexar when they stopped late the next night and slept in a farmer’s barn. The following morning they rode into town, and the sand-colored stucco buildings with their Spanish ironwork and the cobblestone streets were wet and brilliant in the sunlight. The town reminded Son of New Orleans, except it was filled with Texas soldiers who seemed as out of place there as an occupying army in a foreign country. The saloons were crowded early in the day with men who spoke in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia accents, and they behaved as though it were July Fourth back in the United States. When Son thought of the despondency in his camp on the Guadalupe, he wondered if these men were fighting in the same war as Houston’s soldiers. He reached over and touched Deaf on the shoulder.
“These bastards act like they popped their last cap on the Mexicans,” he said.
Deaf stretched his arms on the pommel of his saddle and shook his head.
“I said they act like there ain’t no war,” Son said.
“He understood you,” Hugh said.
“Look at them two in front of the eating house. They’re so drunk they can’t stand up,” Son said.
“What do you want to do, Deaf?” Hugh said.
“You all eat, and I’ll find Bowie.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t,” Deaf said.
“Hell, Deaf, that’s my old friend.”
“You’ll see him later. He’s got to write an answer to Sam first.”
“All right, damn it, but you tell him Hugh Allison’s in Bexar and he better have his dirty bum sober when I see him.”
Son, Hugh, and the corporal tied their horses to an iron tethering post in front of the eating house while Deaf rode down the cobbled street toward the other end of town.
“How’s he know where he’s going?” Son said.
“There’s probably a card parlor down yonder where Jim’s lightening everybody’s pockets.”
“Deaf better not find him there,” Corporal Burnett said.
“Your ass, Burnett. Jim Bowie don’t make changes in what he does for no man.”
“He sure as hell will when the general finds out what he’s let this army turn into,” the corporal said.
Inside the stucco building, most of the tables were filled with men in buckskin clothes, and Mexican women carried out trays of frijoles, huevos rancheros, tortillas, and steaks from a huge open kitchen in the back. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke, and some of the tables had bottles of rum and tequila on them.
“That food smells like it come out of a pepper patch,” Son said.
“That ain’t nothing to what it’ll feel like when it comes out later,” Hugh said. “But we’re going to have a little drink of that Mexican gargle water to smooth it out a bit.”
“I’ll be damned if you are,” the corporal said.
“Burnett, back at camp you can tell me to dig shit holes all you want,” Hugh said. “But we’re in Bexar now, and you ain’t nothing but a wagon escort under Deaf just like we are. Hey, you boys move over and let some of Sam Houston’s best set down.”
They rolled eggs with chili peppers and strips of steak inside tortillas and ate them in huge mouthfuls. The peppers made Son’s eyes water and his stomach burn, but the food was so good he hardly chewed before he swallowed again. Then they each ate a bowl of frijoles with more tortillas and divided a pot of coffee among the three of them. They listened to the conversation around them, and it was a strange one to hear after their experience in the camp on the Guadalupe. The soldiers at the tables talked of Ben Milam tearing General Cos’s army to pieces when he took the town in December, of James Fannin marching any day on Matamoros, of pursuing Santa Anna deep into Mexico and hanging him by his thumbs from a mesquite tree. Their breaths were sour with alcohol and refried beans, and Son noticed that half of them had left their weapons somewhere else.
Hugh reached across the table and picked up a bottle of rum that another man had been drinking from.
“You don’t mind if I buy a drink out of your bottle, do you?” he said.
“Go right ahead, Sam Houston’s best,” the man said. There were only three teeth in the front of his head, and they hung there like twisted pieces of bone.
“From the way you fellows talk, there ain’t much left to this war except getting paid for it,” Hugh said.
“That depends on how you figure it,” the man said. “There might be some more ass-kicking done down south of us.”
“I’d sure like to get in on that. Just where are you going to start kicking these asses?” Hugh said.
“Anywhere we catch them at,” the man said.
“I heered Santa Anna might have five or six thousand men down on the Rio Grande somewhere. Is that the people that gets their butts stuck in the fire?” Hugh said.
“What are you trying to say, mister?” another man said.
“Nothing. We been camped over by Gonzales so long we don’t know what’s going on with the rest of the army. Was you boys with Ben Milam when he took Bexar?”
“You damn right we were.”
“I bet it was a tough fight, wasn’t it?” Hugh said.
“You’re drinking my liquor and trying my patience at the same time, mister. You want to get to your point or just walk out of here?”
“Let’s find Deaf,” the corporal said.
“We got time for that,” Hugh said. “I just want to know if there’s any truth to the story that most of General Cos’s troops was a bunch of raggedy-ass convicts. I heered some of them shot theirself in the foot so they wouldn’t have to fight.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s just a story a fellow told us over in Gonzales.”
“It’s a damn lie, and you take it back.”
“Like hell I will,” Hugh said, his voice level and mean.
“We’re leaving, mister. You own the place,” Son said. “We don’t give a shit if you fought convicts or every Mexican from here to Mexico City. But you touch that dirk and I’ll put a hole in your face as big as your plate.”
Outside, the wind blowing off the San Antonio River was cold against their faces. Clouds were moving over the hills south of town, and large areas of sunlight and shadow swept across the waving grass.
“You done all right in there,” Hugh said.
“You two should be locked up in a crazy house,” Corporal Burnett said.
“We didn’t deal that play. Them fellows did with their big mouths,” Hugh said.
“Allison, you got something inside you that don’t let you leave trouble alone, and one of these days it’s going to put you in a box.” The corporal untethered his horse angrily and pushed hard in the stirrup when he swung up in the saddle.
“Lots have tried it, but the likes of them in there sure ain’t going to do it,” Hugh said.
“Forget it,” Son said.
“I tell you, this is a hell of an army to have to fight a war with,” the corporal said, looking straight ahead as they rode toward the other end of town.
“Ain’t that Deaf’s horse tied up the other side of that paint?” Son said.
“And I bet that big roan with the Mexican saddle is Jim’s. He always did ride fancy,” Hugh said.
Bowie’s headquarters were in a brown adobe building with evenly spaced cedar logs jutting out of the mud bricks along the roof. During the siege of the town in December the Mexicans had torn out one window to ground level and put a cannon in it to command the street, and the area around the sand-bagged hole was pocked from rifle fire. In the front room there was a plank bar with bottles of tequila and corn whiskey and bowls of chili peppers on it, and dirty hand towels hung from nails driven into the plank. Dark men who looked like Acadians out of the Louisiana marshes were drinking at the bar, and each of them wore a large knife in a scabbard and had his rifle leaned at his elbow.
“Mean-looking sonsofbitches, ain’t they?” Hugh said when they walked in.
To one side of the bar was a thick oak door that was partly opened, and behind it they could hear Deaf’s quacking voice.
“Is Jim Bowie in there?” Hugh said.
The dark men stared at him without replying.
“I said is Jim Bowie in there?”
They still didn’t answer, and Hugh started toward the door. One of the dark men stepped in front of him and wagged his finger in Hugh’s face and shook his head.
“What’s the matter, you dumb or something?” Hugh said.
The man said something in French.
“Talk United States,” Hugh said.
“Take it easy. We’ll just wait on Deaf,” Son said.
“I hoped I wouldn’t have to see another Frenchman after I left Louisiana, and I come all the way to Bexar to meet an asshole like this.”
Son and Corporal Burnett looked quickly at the man to see if he had understood. The man’s dark eyes continued to stare at Hugh with the same resolute expression.
“Hell, let’s get a drink. I’ll buy it,” Hugh said.
“Deaf don’t—” the corporal began.
“Deaf don’t care,” Hugh said. “He’s got other things on his mind. Listen to him carrying on in there.”
Son listened to Deaf’s strange voice and realized that this was the first time he had ever heard him speak angrily to anyone. The quacking sound rose and fell, and many of the words were unintelligible, but there was no doubt that Deaf was becoming furious about something.
The Mexican bartender poured clear whiskey into three shot glasses, and they sipped it neat and chased it with salted chili peppers. The whiskey had been aged in a burned-out barrel, and the charcoal taste hung in the glass like smoke. Even the corporal was enjoying it and didn’t object when Son ordered another round.
“That’s the first time I ever heered anybody raise hell with Jim like that and get away with it,” Hugh said.
“Deaf ain’t one to worry about whether somebody likes what he says,” the corporal said
“I got to grant you that,” Hugh said. “He ain’t afraid of too much. But he sounds like he wants to tear Jim’s balls out. Maybe I ought to go in there and straighten it out.”
“Maybe you ought to finish your drink,” Son said.
Deaf came out of the room, his sun-tanned face bright with anger, and let the oak door swing back against its iron hinges. He went to the bar and held up two fingers at the bartender, who poured a double shot into the glass. Through the open door they could see a man in pantaloons and a short brown jacket with Mexican buttons seated behind a table. He coughed violently into a handkerchief, then wiped his mouth and grinned at Hugh.
“I knew they couldn’t keep Hugh Allison in any Frenchman’s jail,” he said.
“How you doing, Jim? Lord, it’s good to see you.”
“Come on in.” He held up a cup with his fingers. “And bring something for this.”
Hugh’s face was shining with pride as he picked up a bottle of whiskey from the bar and went inside the room.
“Close it so we can do ourselves some serious drinking,” the man said.
Son turned to Deaf, whose jawbone was working like a damaged nerve against his cheek.
“He don’t look too healthy. What was going on in there, anyway?” Son said.
“He’s going to fortify the mission.”
Son looked at him, not understanding.
“Sam thinks he ought to blow it up and move out of Bexar,” Deaf said.
“Move where?” the corporal said.
“East, with us. What do you think will happen if they get caught inside them walls?” Deaf said.
Neither the corporal nor Son knew how to answer.
“I ought not to get mad at him. Sam left the choice up to him,” Deaf said. “But a beaver don’t go into a hole unless he’s got a back door.”
“Why don’t he want to pull out?” Son said.
“He figures if they don’t stop Santa Anna here, the Mexicans will sweep through east Texas. I’m going out in the hills south of town. Make sure Allison is sober when I get back tonight.”
“That ain’t easy to do,” the corporal said.
“He damn well better be.” Deaf set his glass on the bar and walked out the door. In the square of yellow light, they saw him jerk back the reins on his horse, wheel it in a circle, and bring his moccasins hard into its ribs.
“I think Deaf just told us something,” the corporal said.
“Don’t worry about Hugh. He sobers up fast,” Son said.
“If you can get the bottle out of his hand first.”
“Get him out of there, then.”
“I ain’t going in there.”
“Then quit worrying. I ain’t seen the situation yet that Hugh don’t handle.”
BUT FIVE HOURS later Son was not as confident. The corporal had ridden across the river to look at the mission and Son was eating a bowl of frijoles in the eating house when Hugh found him. Hugh was drunk in a way that Son hadn’t seen him before. He looked as though he had been drinking for two days rather than a few hours. His face was bloodless and the whites of his eyes had turned yellow.
“You and Bowie must have licked the cup dry,” Son said.
“No, he went to sleep about three hours ago.”
“Where you been?”
“I found a jenny-barn down by the river.”
“Eat some food.”
“I don’t want none. Them beans turns your skin brown, anyway.”
“You ought to eat something.”
“I’m going to have another drink.”
“Deaf rode out in the hills. He’s coming back tonight and we’re leaving.”
“You’re really in your cup, Hugh.”
“Jim’s awful sick. I think it’s the pneumonie. He carries on like his old self, still full of laughs and fun, and these men would kiss the ground he walks on. But he don’t fool me. He’s got a worm buried down there in his chest.”
“Let it go, Hugh.”
“You know his wife and both his children died of cholera?”
“Let’s find that ammunition wagon and make sure everything’s ready for tonight. They didn’t have much power to spare, but they give us a lot of flints and a mess of nails.”
“I told you I ain’t done drinking yet.”
“Listen, damn you, we’re going to be moving at night, and for all we know there’s Mexican skirmishers already out in them hills. How’d you like to run into one of their patrols while your brains was still boiled?”
“How much money you got?”
“About a dollar and a half and some scrip.”
“Come on down to the river with me.”
Son began to eat again without answering.
“When we get back to camp Burnett is going to have us digging shit holes till this war is over,” Hugh said.
“I ain’t going to no jenny-barn.”
“You’re still stuck on Sana, ain’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“You still figuring on going back there?”
“I ain’t got no other place to go. You ain’t, either.”
“Listen, boy, it’s no good to go back where you already been. It ain’t the same. Other people own it, and it ain’t yours no more.”
“Where?”
“I’ll ride down with you to that first cantina on the river and we’ll have a drink. Then I’ll buy you a meal and we’ll find the ammunition wagon.”
“I already know where it’s at, and I’ll put the cork in the jug when I feel like it. I done told you whiskey or wine don’t bother me. If I can do a job sober, I can do it drunk, too.”
“I understand that, Hugh, but how about taking your sleeve out of my plate?”
They went outside and rode through the cobbled streets toward a low adobe building on the river bank. Son looked across the river at the long gray walls of the Alamo Mission, the huge expanse of dirt plaza, the roofless crumbling church in the center, and wondered what it would be like to be trapped inside while thousands of Santa Anna’s troops walked through their own cannon smoke, across their own dead, wave after wave, until they finally breached the wall and poured inside in a murderous mob. But this afternoon the sun was high above the hills in a blue sky, the mission was empty and quiet in the clear air, and the wind blew through the cattails on the river’s edge and ruffled the green current and carried with it the laughter of girls in the cantina.
“Did you ask Bowie about Emile Landry?” Son said.
“What?”
“Get your mind off them tavern maids. What did Bowie say about Landry?”
“About two months ago he heered there was some slave hunters in town looking for two convicts. But he ain’t seen no Frenchmen except the ones he brung over from Louisiana.”
They left that night with the ammunition wagon for Gonzales. Going along the trace in the dark, Deaf said he had ridden fifteen miles into the hills south of town and had found a dead fire with a Mexican horseshoe in the ash.