THEY WERE STANDING picket on the edge of the woods in the early dawn, and the fog hung in a solid white cloud on the meadow. They heard the rider before they saw him. Son and Hugh lifted their rifles to port arms, then the rider burst through the fog, his horse and clothes soaked with dew, his flop hat blowing behind his neck on a leather cord. Son heard a picket down the line cock his rifle.
“He’s one of ours!” Son shouted.
The rider never slowed down. He bent low over the horse’s neck and galloped through the trees, exploding ashes out of dead camp fires and clattering metal pots across the ground.
“Come back, you crazy sonofabitch,” Son yelled after him.
“Let’s get him before we have to explain how we let him through,” Hugh said. They ran through the woods after the rider, and other men were crawling out of their tents and lean-tos.
The rider had already stopped in front of Houston’s tent, dropped the reins to the ground, and dismounted in one motion. Corporal Burnett was striding toward him angrily.
“General, I come from Bexar with a letter from Colonel Travis,” the rider said outside the closed flap. He was breathless, and the backs of his legs were shaking from the long ride.
“General Houston ain’t here,” the corporal said. “What do you mean going through our camp like that?”
“Where’s he at?”
“Washington-on-the-Brazos.”
“Damn!” the rider said, then wiped the sweat off his forehead with the flat of his hand. There was almost pain in his eyes.
“You can talk with Captain Sherman. He’s in the next tent.”
“This letter goes to Houston.”
“He’s too far away for you.”
“Colonel Travis said—”
“You done the best you could, soldier,” the corporal said.
The captain untied his tent flap and held it partly open with his arm.
“Bring the letter in,” he said.
The rider hesitated, then stooped under the canvas, and the captain tied the thong to the tent pole again.
“I got a notion Jim’s luck has done run out,” Hugh said.
“Look at that horse’s sides. He must have roweled him all the way from Bexar,” Son said.
The area around Captain Sherman’s tent was now crowded with soldiers. Some of them were still pulling on their gum coats and tucking their pants inside their boots.
“What the hell you all think you’re doing?” the corporal said. “The captain’s talking, and he don’t need nobody eavesdropping on him.”
But no one moved.
“Go on, the lot of you,” the corporal said.
“Are they caught over in Bexar?” one soldier said.
“How do I know?”
“You reckon we’re marching?” another soldier said.
“I don’t know nothing,” the corporal said. “You all just get your ass back where you belong.”
But they still didn’t move. The sun began to burn through the fog, and a pale light filled the woods. Back in the trees the cooks were frying fatback on the Dutch oven.
The captain and the rider came out of the tent together.
“Corporal, get this man some breakfast and call muster in a half hour,” the captain said, then went inside the tent again.
The soldiers followed Corporal Burnett and the rider in a large balloon to the cooking area. The rider sat on a log with a plate of fatback and cornbread in his hands and started to eat. They saw the exhaustion in his face and the way his thighs still quivered, and they waited for him to speak. But he simply continued to eat with his face turned into the plate.
“Don’t bust your teeth on that cornbread. We use it for grapeshot sometimes,” one soldier said in the silence.
“It’s all right,” the rider said. He wiped the grease off his mouth on his sleeve and started chewing on another piece of fatback. “Can one of you boys put my saddle on a fresh horse? I’m leaving out soon as I finish this.”
“What’s going on in Bexar?” Hugh said.
“We’re surrounded. There must be thousands of them out there, and more is coming in every day. Santa Anna run a red flag up on a church, and his buglers is blowing the Deguello. They ain’t giving no quarter.”
“How’d you get out?” Son said.
“I was talking a little bit to Jesus, mister. I was almost through their line when I run right over about five of them sleeping on the ground. I could hear them balls popping around my ears.”
“How’d you get surrounded?” another soldier said.
“Bowie probably didn’t have no patrols out, that’s how,” the corporal said.
“It wouldn’t make no difference. Bowie wouldn’t run nohow,” the rider said.
“Ain’t you got no help from Fannin?”
“Far as I know he’s still playing with himself down at Goliad. Davy Crockett come in, though, with twelve others from Tennessee. That sonofabitch don’t know what scared is. He stands out there on the wall and pops Mexicans like turkeys and don’t even duck down when he reloads.”
“How many you lost?” Hugh said.
“Nobody. But them eighteen-pounders is knocking the hell out of the walls. That’s the way the Mexicans fight. They get the edge on you and light a fire under your balls.”
“I reckon we’ll give them something else to think about when we come up their ass,” another soldier said.
“I hope you do it soon. When they punch a couple of holes in our wall, they’re going to come at us like flies swarming out of shit.”
A young soldier led a fresh horse with the rider’s saddle on it into the clearing. The rider set his plate on the edge of the Dutch oven and brushed his fingers on his coat.
“I’ll see you boys later,” he said. “You’re right about the cornbread. You could knock a man unconscious with it.”
“You going to find Houston?”
“One of you boys is going to do that. I’m headed back to the mission.”
“You won’t get through again,” the corporal said.
“If I don’t, them Mexicans is going to think they was attacked in the rear by the whole Texas army.”
They watched him mount his horse, and each of them looked intently at his face.
“Hold on and I’ll walk with you to the edge of the trees,” Hugh said. “You can’t never tell when you’re going to step into a latrine around here.”
He and Son walked along beside the rider to the edge of the field. The rider already had the reins wrapped around the back of his hand and was looking into the distance.
“How’s Jim Bowie?” Hugh said.
“Real bad. He was setting a cannon up on the wall, the carriage toppled, and he took a hell of a fall. I think it busted his ribs. Right now they got him on a cot in the barracks. He can’t hardly lift his head sometimes.”
“Tell him you seen Hugh Allison.”
“Sure.”
“Here’s a couple of twists of tobacco to chew on.”
The rider put the tightly twisted leaves in his coat pocket.
“I’ll see you all in Bexar,” he said, and cut his Mexican spurs into the horse’s ribs.
“What a time for Houston to be back on the Brazos,” Son said.
“It don’t make no difference.”
“You reckon it’s that bad?”
“We can’t help them. They’re on their own.”
Ten minutes later they assembled for muster in the field, and the expectation was like electricity in each row of soldiers. They pulled on the cords of their powder horns and shifted their rifles from one hand to the other while the corporal called off the endless roll of names. The captain wore a blue high-collar uniform with brass buttons and braid on the shoulders, and his lean aristocratic features and educated Kentucky accent made Son vaguely distrustful of him.
“He don’t look like he knows what he’s going to say,” he whispered.
“He’s going to say what General Sam told him to say if this happened,” Hugh said.
“That we’re going to flesh out some Mexicans,” a man behind them said.
“Shut up that talking in ranks,” the corporal said.
The captain glanced briefly over the heads of the men, then began speaking as though he were choosing each word from a private box in his mind.
“Bexar is under siege. Santa Anna has moved anywhere from fifteen hundred to six thousand troops around the Alamo Mission. Some of them are zapadores, the best in the Mexican army, and their artillery is well placed beyond the range of our sharpshooters. However, Colonel Travis has written that he has been joined by Davy Crockett and his Tennessee volunteers.”
“I can’t hear him,” the man behind Son said.
“Then be quiet,” Son said.
“Many of you have been to Bexar and have seen the mission. It has thick walls on four sides, a deep well, and Colonel Travis has mounted a cannon on top of the church. Also, he was able to put away a large store of food, powder, and shot before he was encircled. There is no better place that he could defend against such superior numbers.
“Many of us have lifelong friends within those walls. Everything in us urges us to go immediately to the aid of our countrymen. But not only is the fate of Bexar at stake now. The fate of Texas itself rests in our hands and what we do now. If we move on the Mexicans with our present force, we may bring relief temporarily to the Alamo, but we stand no chance of turning about the eventual outcome of the battle. By advancing from the Guadalupe we will open the entirety of south Texas to invasion, pillage, and defeat. There will be nothing to stop the barbarism of the Mexicans from here to the Sabine River.
“General Houston has been at the convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He is presently calling men to arms throughout the countryside. I expect him back in the next few days with a large and well-equipped force. By that time Colonel Fannin should be within striking distance of Bexar. In the meantime, we must all have faith in the stout hearts of our friends, who will hold the mission long beyond the limits of ordinary men. I know the pain that each of you feels at our situation, but we cannot allow a lack of forbearance to make worthless the courageous stand of those in the Alamo in our country’s gravest hour. I ask each of you, separately, to stay here with me on the Guadalupe until General Houston’s return.”
After they were dismissed they continued to stand in the field, at first silent and numb, and then with a swelling anger that had no place to vent itself. Some of them looked meanly at the captain’s back as he walked toward the trees, others stared toward the west as though they could catch sight of the cannon smoke drifting above the mission seventy miles away, and a few already had a bitter resolve in their faces that was impervious to an officer’s rhetoric.
“It’s our damn luck we got to stand picket again tonight,” Hugh said.
“Let’s see if we can go somewhere with Deaf and get out of it.”
“He left last night for Victoria.”
“Then let’s make sure we’re on the east side of the woods tonight.”
“You know Burnett ain’t going to let us off that easy.”
That evening, while they ate their dinner by the fire, Son and Hugh saw several men go into their tents and lean-tos and begin rolling their blankets and few belongings inside their gum coats.
“Burnett stuck us on the west side of the woods tonight,” Hugh said, loudly. “The wind off that river is colder than a well diggers ass.”
“Turn in the other direction and you won’t feel it,” a voice inside a tent said.
There was a full moon that night, and the waving grass in the field was lighted with silver and the river was bright in the distance. Son and Hugh stood just inside the edge of the trees, with their rifles leaned against a pine trunk and their hands in their pockets. There were dark clouds in the west and a rain ring had formed around the moon.
“Who’d they put on the horses?” Son said.
“A couple of them fellows from Alabama. But I seen one of them roll his blankets after supper.”
“Maybe they won’t try it till tomorrow night.”
“Shit, I hope so. Before this war’s over I’m going to get even with Burnett for all the things he done to us.”
“He’s standing picket, too.”
“Right. Down by the widest part of the river where nobody except a crazy man would try to cross.”
“I can’t hardly blame them fellows.”
“Maybe I can’t, either. But they’re dead men when they leave here. And every man we lose is one less rifle when we get into it ourself.”
“I heered the captain tell the lieutenant they was going to fire a cannon every morning in the mission to show they was still defending.”
“That sounds like Travis. Jim wouldn’t waste no powder setting off a gun that nobody except Mexicans will hear.”
A long strip of black cloud slipped across the moon, and the field and the river were suddenly dark. Son and Hugh could hear their own breathing.
“Listen. There’s somebody back there in the trees,” Son said.
They stared through the black trunks of the pines, and the limbs overhead clicked against one another in the wind.
“I hope somebody ain’t taking a piss back there, because I’d sure hate to shoot his pecker off,” Hugh called out.
It was quiet a moment, then they heard movement in the trees again, this time going away from them.
“How are those dumb bastards going to get through the Mexican lines when they can’t get past their own pickets?” Hugh said.
“I think they figured us for an easy mark. You know who’s on picket up the line? That wild sonofabitch that shot a cow the other day.”
“They figured wrong, then. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get my ass turned on a spit. I already dug enough latrines for the whole country to shit in. And this deal could mean a court martial.”
“You see him? Right on the other side of that short pine.”
In the dark they saw a man come out from the trees, holding his horse by the bridle and covering the nose with his other hand. The man stood motionless in dark silhouette, then led his horse on into the field. A moment later fourteen other soldiers and horses followed him.
“Sonsofbitches,” Hugh said. “I’d like to kill them. I should have beat the piss out of a couple of them earlier to get the message across.”
“They’re going to go right north of Burnett, and he’s going to know where they come out.”
“Look at them, strung out all the way across the field like a parade.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Give them another minute. I reckon that ought to be enough even for these dumb assholes.”
They waited silently while the column of men and horses went deeper into the field.
“All right,” Hugh said. “Aim to the side. In case Burnett sees the flashes he can’t tell us we shot high.”
They let off their rifles, and the flames exploded out from the barrels into the darkness. A second later other pickets to the north and south of them fired their weapons, but the flashes were all at an upward angle. The column bolted for the river, each man bent low over his horse, his blanket roll bouncing behind the saddle.
“Good luck,” Hugh said.
“I’ll be damned. They went past Burnett and he didn’t shoot.”
“He’s probably setting in his own shit. But then maybe he ain’t all sonofabitch after all.”
On the same day that Houston arrived back in camp, two Mexicans rode in and said that the mission had fallen. Before Houston could take the two men into his tent and question them, the news had already spread throughout the camp that there was now nothing to stop Santa Anna’s advance across Texas. Houston placed the Mexicans under arrest and had his officers walk among the tents saying they were spies and their word was worthless, but that night twenty men who had families between Bexar and the Guadalupe swam their horses across the river.
It was barely first light when Deaf squatted before the lean-to and pulled on Son’s boot.
“Get in the saddle,” he said. “You ain’t got time to eat. Just put some biscuits in your poke.”
“What’s going on?” Hugh said.
“We’re riding as close to Bexar as we can.”
“Now, wait a minute, Deaf,” Hugh said.
“I ain’t got time to talk with you. Just get it moving.”
“There might be a few thousand Mexicans down that road.”
“That’s right, and we ain’t going to get caught with our britches hanging in a tree.”
“I thought them Mexicans was supposed to be spies,” Son said.
“Spies, my ass. They’re a couple of farmers,” Deaf said.
They forded the river on a submerged pebble-covered sandbar and rode up through the willows on the other side. It had rained during the night, but now the sky was a clear blue with pink clouds on the horizon and they could feel the early sun on their backs. The live oaks and the blackjack and the grass in the fields were shining with dew, and the rolling countryside ahead looked so beautiful to Son that it seemed impossible to believe that down the trace the mission could be a fire-blackened ruin and all the soldiers he had met in Bexar were dead.
“Deaf, what do you reckon Houston’s going to do if them two Mexicans was right?” he said.
“He already told me. Put a rear guard on Gonzales to get the civilians out and run.”
“When the hell do we stop?”
“When we ain’t got to fight them like they want us to. That’s what Fannin can’t understand. Sam’s ordered him to haul his ass to Victoria before he gets cut up, too. But if I know Fannin he’ll still be thinking about taking Matamoros when the grape starts singing around his ears.”
“You still ain’t answered me.”
“No, and I ain’t got to. Maybe the whole army will get chewed up in pieces before we can turn and make them hurt. But if they can be whupped with what we got, Sam will find the way to do it.”
“We ain’t arguing with you, Deaf,” Hugh said. “It just don’t feel too good to run.”
“He knows that. It don’t feel good to him, either. Some of them sonsofbitches back at Washington-on-the-Brazos is calling him a drunkard and a coward.”
“That ain’t all he’s going to get called when them back at camp hear we’re running,” Son said.
“Them kind ain’t worth a shit nohow, and I just as lief be shut of them,” Deaf said.
That afternoon, as they came out of an oak grove, they saw a white woman and a black man coming toward them on horseback. A second black man walked beside them, and the woman held a little girl in her arms. Her dress was gathered up to her thighs so she could ride like a man, and there was a soiled bandage on her leg. Her clothes were spotted with dried mud, her face windburned, and there was an electric quality in her face that a person with a high fever would have.
“Do you come from Bexar, ma’am?” Deaf said.
She continued to stare at him strangely.
“She don’t understand Deaf’s voice,” Son said.
“You’re coming from Bexar, ain’t you, ma’am?” Hugh said.
“Yes. They are all killed there.”
“Well, you let me hold that little girl a piece. I bet your arms is plumb wore out,” Hugh said.
He dismounted and started to take the child from her, but her arms were rigid.
“It’s all right. We’re with Sam Houston’s army at Gonzales,” he said. “We’re going to rest a bit and then take you there.”
“Why didn’t you come? They waited on the walls for you each morning.”
“Let’s go back to the trees where you can rest,” Hugh said, with the child on his shoulder. “I got some biscuits in my poke, and I’m going to warm them up for this little one.”
“Where’s Santa Anna at?” Deaf said to the black man on horseback.
“They coming on the trace. We seen their fires way off one night.”
“How many fires?”
The man shook his head.
“Was there a lot or just a few?”
The man was afraid to answer. Instead, he reached inside his shirt and handed Deaf a waxen brown envelope sealed with a melted candle. As they rode back toward the oak trees Deaf opened the letter in his fingers.
“It’s in Spanish,” Son said.
“That’s because it’s from Santa Anna himself. Wait till Sam sees this.”
“What’s it say?”
“He’ll pardon any Texian that lays down his arms. Otherwise, we all get the same they got at the Alamo.”
“I reckon the general will find a use for that paper,” Hugh said.
Hugh built a fire of twigs in the trees and browned his biscuits on a sharpened stick for the woman and the little girl. The woman said her name was Susannah Dickerson, the wife of Lieutenant Almeron Dickerson, one of the last to die in the mission. Then she told the story of the eleven-day siege and the final attack at dawn on March 6 that left all one hundred and eighty-eight Texians dead and fifteen hundred Mexican casualties.
The Mexican artillery pounded the walls for days, and each time a breach was made and the Texians had to repair it the Mexicans loaded with grape and moved their cannon closer until they were less than three hundred yards from the plaza. The sharpshooters on the wall devastated the Mexican infantry whenever they tried to move their line forward, but the barrage continued without respite through the day, and each night there were more and more campfires surrounding the mission as Santa Anna received reinforcements. The plaza was filled with craters and strewn with exploded rubble, and by the afternoon of March 5 the smoke was so thick from the Mexican cannons that the Texians could barely see the thousands of troops waiting on four sides of them.
Travis assembled the men and told them that no help was coming, their hours were probably short, and that any man who wished could surrender and ask for quarter or try to get through the Mexican lines. That night a man named Louis Rose dropped over the north wall.
As the first light touched the hills the next morning they heard the Deguello blow, then the Mexicans attacked in waves as far as the eye could see. The Texians loaded their cannons with chopped horseshoes, nails, and trace chains, and cut huge holes in the Mexican advance. But their ranks closed again, and they kept coming through the smoke with their bayonets fixed while the gunners on top of the church worked furiously to depress their cannon and reload.
The sharpshooters on the wall fired point-blank into the Mexicans’ faces and clubbed and stabbed at their heads and threw back their ladders. Then the earthen works by the church were blown apart and they poured into the plaza, screaming with the adrenaline of having lived through the initial attack. Travis was dead with a ball through the brain, and Crockett and the other survivors from the walls were running for the barracks by the church. The gunners on top of the church turned their cannon around and fired into the breached earthen works. The Mexicans caught there were shredded with hundreds of nails. Then the breach was filled with screaming men again, and the gunners were cut down with a fusillade of rifle balls as they tried to swab out their cannon with buckets of water.
Crockett and three others were hacked to pieces against the barracks wall. The Mexicans burst through the barracks door and found Jim Bowie on his cot. He fired a derringer into the face of a sergeant, then a dozen bayonets entered his body almost simultaneously.
When the shooting had stopped the Mexicans found five Texians who had tried to hide. They were taken before Santa Anna and then executed. The bodies of the Texians were stacked in the plaza, with mesquite brush under each layer of dead, and burned. The fire lasted until morning, and a sweet-sickening smell hung over Bexar for two days.
That night they broke camp on the Guadalupe and began to retreat eastward. They spiked two brass cannons and sank them in the river, loaded their wagons until the wheel rims sank to the spokes in the sand, and put a rear guard on Gonzales to protect the civilian evacuation. The rear guard was told to burn any supplies that could be used by the Mexicans, but instead they burned the whole town. The long column of horses, wagons, soldiers on foot, and escaping families wound through the dark woods, creek beds, and flooded bottoms, and Houston rode up and down the line, talking quietly to frightened children, calling men who had enlisted only a few days earlier by name, and dismounting to push on a wagon when it became mired in a slough. Throughout the night they could still see the glow of the fires in Gonzales. Toward dawn Houston noticed that the last supply wagon in the column had fallen far back in the rear and that the riders around it were swaying in the saddle.
“Allison and Holland, come with me,” he said.
They galloped along the column to the wagon. The two teamsters in the wagon-box had been members of the rear guard, and their eyelids were half-shut and their faces white. The riders were in equally bad condition, grinning and nodding stupidly at Houston.
“I see you gentlemen managed to save the whiskey before you burned the town,” he said.
“We figured they’d be sick people that could use it, General,” one rider said.
“I’m glad you men had the welfare of others in mind. Now chop up all those barrels.”
“Some of it’s Spanish rum, General.”
“That’s good. Only the best should go into the soil of the republic.”
Hugh dismounted, picked up a barrel over his head, and smashed the staves apart against a rock.
“My heart’s leaking, too, boys,” he said. “That smell sure does bring back a lot of wonderful nights, don’t it?”
They burst barrels all over the ground and trees until their moccasins and boots were soaking in liquor. Houston watched from his horse with a handkerchief contianing hartshorn held to his nose. Hugh was laughing, his face and hair beaded with drops of whiskey.
“Is it that bad, General?” he said.
“I’m afraid that it is, Hugh.”
For two weeks the retreat continued, through Burnham’s Crossing, Beason’s Ferry, San Felipe, and finally to Groce’s Landing on the Brazos River. Houston refused to tell his men or even his junior officers when he planned to turn and fight, and at night the anger and the doubt toward him grew around the camp fires.
Then two riders came into camp and told what happened to James Fannin and his men at Goliad.
They had been caught in the open six miles out of town by one thousand of General Urrea’s troops. They overturned their wagons, shot their horses for cover, threw up earthen works, and fought for two days without water until they were pulling nails from their wagon boards to fire in their muskets. Fannin surrendered, and was told that his men would be paroled, marched to the coast, and placed on a ship for New Orleans.
“It was early Palm Sunday morning when they come in the presidio and started picking up our blankets,” one of the riders said. He was a tall mountain man dressed in buckskin, with an old scar across his nose and two fingers missing from his right hand. “We should have figured then what they was up to. I asked this one Mexican to let me keep my blanket, and he said you won’t need it no more. They marched three hundred and fifty of us out on the road, and left Colonel Fannin and about seventy other wounded in the presidio. Just before I went out the gate I seen the colonel setting by a fire with a stick twisted through the bandage on his leg. He said, ‘Don’t you worry none, Will. We’ll be having a drink together in New Orleans next week.’
“All along the road there was Mexican women saying, ‘Pobrecitos. Pobrecitos.’ Then them sonsofbitches told us to kneel down. The fellow next to me says, ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll kneel before a greaser,’ and then somebody hollers, ‘Run for it, boys. They’re going to shoot us.’ Their guns was going off all around us. They was firing so close to us I could feel the powder stinging my skin. People was crying out to Jesus and hunched up on the ground with their arms over their heads. The face of that boy next to me just exploded all over my chest. I don’t know how I done it, but I run right over a Mexican and kept on a-going till I hit the woods. Behind me they was gigging the wounded with their pig stickers. I could hear them screaming a half mile into the trees.
“About an hour later I heered shooting start again back at the presidio. It didn’t last long this time, though. Most of them poor boys was already hurt so bad they couldn’t do nothing but lie there.”
HOUSTON HEARD THAT Santa Anna was preparing to cross the Brazos south of him, and he sent Deaf, Son, and Hugh down the river toward Fort Bend. Spring was taking hold of the land; the new grass was green in the fields, and the first wild flowers grew along the creek banks. The mornings were still cool, but by noon the sun was warm, and there was a smell in the air of pine rosin and plowed acreage.
At San Felipe they picked up the rutted wagon and hoof tracks of the Mexican advance, but because the Mexicans marched in a long double file and had been driving cattle with them, it was impossible to estimate the size of their force. North of Fort Bend, they entered a pine woods on a low crest above the river, and Deaf swung down from his horse and felt the ashes in a dead camp fire.
“They ain’t far,” he said. “Let’s walk them. Don’t shoot at nothing, even if you step on one’s face.”
“I don’t know about that, Deaf,” Son said.
“You drop a hammer in here and you won’t live fifteen minutes. You ever kill a man with a knife?”
“I have,” Hugh said. “There ain’t nothing to it. You just give it to them in the rib cage, twist once, and you’re out.”
“Good,” Deaf said.
They walked on through the woods, leading their horses, and down the slope they could see the Brazos floating high over its banks into the willow trees. Deaf stopped, raised his hand, and remained motionless. Then he turned, held up two fingers, and tethered his horse to a pine trunk. Neither Son nor Hugh could see anything through the trees. They stooped low and crept forward over the pine needles, with Deaf in the lead. Son smelled tobacco smoke.
In a short clearing they saw two Mexican privates with their backs turned to them. They had leaned their muskets against a tree, and one of them was smoking a pipe. They were watching a flatboat on the river that was out of control in the current. Deaf pulled his bowie knife out of the deerskin scabbard on his leg and pointed at the Mexican on the right for Hugh and Son. Then they crashed out of the brush together into the clearing.
Deaf drove his knife all the way to the hilt into the back of the picket’s neck so that the point came out the throat. A bloody clot exploded from the picket’s mouth, his body shook in a convulsion, and he slipped forward off the knife as though he had been disemboweled. The second man had been quicker when he heard the brush rattle, and had run for his musket. Hugh swung his knife at him, but the man arched his back away from the blade and the point caught only the cloth of his jacket. But Son ran toward him at the same time with his rifle butt held up like a pike and drove it into the man’s ear. The man spun around in a pirouette, off balance, and Son hit him twice more as though he were hammering a nail into wood.
“Go down, you sonofabitch,” he said.
Deaf stabbed his knife into the picket’s back and lifted on the handle at the same time.
“Take their guns. They can use them back at camp,” he said.
“Them Mexicans sure got hard heads, ain’t they?” Hugh said.
Son was still breathing hard.
“I wonder why he didn’t holler out,” he said.
“He was too scared,” Hugh said.
“These is probably their furtherest pickets,” Deaf said. “That means their camp is about four or five hundred yards away. If we run across any more pickets, we ain’t going to jump them. We’ll go around from the other side.”
They worked their way on through the woods, staying close to the pine trunks, their heads bent low, and stopping like pieces of stone whenever they heard a pine cone topple through the branches overhead to the ground. They saw the trees begin to thin ahead, and they circled away from the river until they reached an eroded gulley, with heavy timber on each side, that led back toward the riverbank.
They walked along the edge of the gulley through the wild fern and deep shadows, and they could smell the dank, cool odor of the water coursing over the rocks below; then they saw the sunlight at the end of the trees where the stream bed sloped down to the Brazos. They crawled on their stomachs until they could look out over the wide stretch of sandy bank.
“Look at all them bastards,” Hugh said.
The bank was covered with Mexican troops, tents, horses, mules, oxen, and ammunition and supply wagons. A ferry boat loaded with infantry was crossing the river. In the center of the camp was a command tent with the Mexican tricolor flag flying over it.
Deaf took a spyglass from inside his shirt and moved it slowly back and forth over the beach as though he were dividing it into segments that he could reduce to numerical equations in his mind. Then he handed Son the glass, took a piece of slate from his shirt pocket, and began making columns of tally marks.
“You check me,” he said. “I count fifteen wagons. Most of them look like ammunition. Which means they’re living off the land. Which means they’re stealing and burning everything as they go. I don’t see but one field piece down there, and it looks like a twelve-pounder. Some of that infantry is zapadores, and that means this is probably the same bunch that killed everybody in the Alamo. I think Sam will be glad to hear that little piece of news. Now, I just need to find out if that little fart Santa Anna is in that tent yonder.”
But as Son looked through the glass, he wasn’t thinking of the number of troops, cannon, or ammunition wagons in the camp. He had focused the lens on five men who were drinking from cups at a table under a canvas awning.
“Take a look, Hugh. Just to the right of the command tent.”
Hugh put his good eye to the glass.
“Sonofabitch. He’s still with it,” he said.
“I thought he’d throw it in by this time.”
“We should have doubled back on them bastards and cut their throats months ago.”
“What’s wrong with you two?” Deaf said.
“There’s a fellow down there named Emile Landry and four others that’s got a special interest in us,” Hugh said.
“You mean them Louisiana prison guards?”
“How’d you know?” Son said.
“Sam told me. I don’t take nobody out on scout with me unless I know what time of day he drops his britches.”
“At least we can kill the sonofabitch now and not get hung for murder,” Hugh said.
“You ain’t going to do it today. And before you go thinking them men down yonder don’t have nothing to do but chase you across Texas, remember you ain’t the only ones in this army that got warrants on them from Louisiana. I think half of them Frenchies Bowie brung with him to Bexar had manacle scars on their ankles.”
“That might be true, but that man’s got something extra in mind for us,” Son said.
“Then he done joined up with the wrong bunch, because Sam was mad as hell when he heered about what happened at Goliad, and when the time comes these Mexicans ain’t going to get no more mercy than they give Jim Fannin.”
WHEN THEY GOT back to camp and reported to Houston’s tent, they disovered that Santa Anna had sent a black man to the general with a message that he was going to burn the temporary capital at Harrisburg, execute anyone there bearing arms, then march on Houston’s army and destroy it.
“I don’t know whether to believe it or not. What do you think, Mr. E.?” Houston said to Deaf. He was pushed back in his chair with his boots on the table. Son and Hugh stood with their arms folded over their rifle barrels.
“He’s an arrogant enough sonofabitch to do it,” Deaf said.
“But you saw only one twelve-pounder. Would he attack with no more artillery than that to support him?”
“I ain’t one to say, but I think they’re getting careless, General,” Hugh said. “If we’d had a field piece, we could have blowed grape all over their camp.”
“Yes. Yes. But was that Santa Anna you saw on the river? We won’t bring peace to Texas until we put our hand on his throat.”
“I’da stayed there all day to find out, Sam, but we killed them two pickets and their relief was coming sometime.”
“I know, Mr. E. I never had a better scout. You two fellows have done well by me, too,” Houston said. He took a piece of shaved pine wood and a pocketknife from his coat and began to notch it between his thumb and the blade. “I’m just going to have to think on this one a bit.”
That night they began the march to Harrisburg. More volunteers from east Texas had joined Houston’s army, but many of the men had come down with measles and the worst thunderstorm of the spring drenched the prairie. The oxen and two six-pounder cannon, which Houston had named “the twin sisters of Texas,” mired in the mud, the horses reared in the flashes of lightning across the sky, and the rain drove so hard in the men’s eyes that they couldn’t see a line of trees fifty yards before them. They marched for two and one-half days, sleeping in wet blankets and eating their food cold, to arrive at Buffalo Bayou and find Harrisburg burned and the government fled.
“Damn, the Mexicans don’t leave much behind when they go through a place,” Hugh said.
The stores, saloons, and shotgun houses along the dirt streets were still smoking in the light rain, and the people who had been driven out of town when the Mexicans set it afire had now returned and were pulling blackened boards loose from the piles of debris that had been their homes and businesses. An odor of burned hair and horseflesh still came from the livery stable, and the cattle in the lot behind the stock barn had all been shot.
“What they got against these people?” Son said.
“Look at that old woman rooting in them busted preserve jars.”
“That’s the worst thing about a war. The civilians ain’t got no stake in it, and they always get it first.”
“Santa Anna better pray he ain’t ever captured. I was listening last night to some boys that was at Goliad. They got some real mean things in their mind.”
“Like Deaf says, he’s such an arrogant sonofabitch he thinks he can torch the whole country and then cut us up for breakfast. We’re going to find out pretty soon, though.”
“How you know? Houston don’t say shit half the time about what we’re doing.”
“The San Jacinto River is just east of us. I don’t think him or Santa Anna either one wants to cross it this time of year. Besides, there’s all kind of swamps on each side of it.”
The army marched eastward, and the next day Son, Hugh, and Deaf rode ten miles ahead of the advance and encountered a Mexican patrol of fifteen mounted soldiers that had just emerged from a woods into a long open field. The Mexicans were stopped about two hundred yards away, staring at the three of them. Son pulled back the hammer of his rifle to half-cock.
“Don’t shoot,” Deaf said. “Wait till we see what they’re going to do. They ain’t sure what we got behind us.”
An officer in the lead put a spyglass to his eye, then kicked his spurs into his horse’s sides.
“He wants prisoners. Give it to them and shoot low,” Deaf said.
They fired their rifles almost simultaneously, and clouds of black smoke exploded from their barrels. Two of the Mexican horses went down, but the other riders kept coming.
“Hit it for the trees!” Deaf said.
They jerked the reins around and poured it on their horses. Son was leaned forward in the saddle, the reins in his teeth, his legs clenched tightly on the horse’s heaving sides, while he tried to pull the ramrod from his rifle. He heard three or four rifles go off behind him and then the popping sound of a ball cutting through the air by his ear. They thundered into the pine trees, swung down from their saddles, and crouched behind the trunks.
“Get that Colt working!” Deaf yelled. He and Son were pouring powder and ramming balls and greased patches down their rifle barrels.
Hugh knelt to the side of a pine tree and began firing and cocking the heavy Colt’s revolver with both hands. Each time the hammer came down the gun roared upward over his head. The explosions were deafening. A red hole the size of a dollar burst open in a Mexican horse’s forequarters, and the rider went down with him in a tangle of hooves and reins and stirrups.
“Ole spyglass there is going to think we got a regiment in here,” Hugh said.
By the time his hammer clicked on an empty chamber, Son and Deaf were reloaded and aiming their Kentucky rifles at the crossed bandoliers on the officer’s chest. Deaf fired first, and the ball caught the officer in the stomach and blew blood out his back on the horse’s rump. The reins collapsed, the horse slowed to a walk, and the officer sat still in the saddle with his hands pressed to the wound as though he could hold his life inside him. The other Mexicans turned and raced back toward the opposite woods. The man who had lost his horse was running among them.
“Let’s see what we got out here,” Deaf said.
They walked into the field, where the officer still sat in the saddle. His eyes were caught between fear of them and his death.
“Donde está Santa Anna?” Deaf said.
The Mexican’s head nodded forward, and the movement caused his horse to walk a few paces until Son took the reins.
“This fellow ain’t no good to us. Go through his saddlebags,” Hugh said.
Deaf untied his saddlebags and emptied them on the ground. They held a pair of socks and underwear, a shirt, a bar of soap and a razor, some women’s hose, and a heavy gold watch.
Deaf unsnapped the gold case on the watch and read the inscription inside: “To Our Beloved Son, David Cummings.”
“What’s the matter?” Hugh said.
“I knowed this man in Bexar.”
Hugh and Son were silent a moment.
“What d’ you want to do with spyglass here? He’s fading pretty fast,” Hugh said.
“Pull his wood tag and leave him. We need to find out what’s on the other side of that woods. A patrol this big means they ain’t far from home.”
Through the humid afternoon and evening they continued to scout the perimeter of Santa Anna’s army. Late that night when they reported back to Houston, Deaf said he was convinced that Santa Anna was turning his troops north at San Jacinto Bay, which would put him in a box with the water at his back.
SANTA ANNA CAMPED on a stretch of dry elevated ground on the southeast side of the river, with a large marsh area on his right flank. His engineers built breastworks of logs and earth on his front and left flank, and the twelve-pounder cannon was placed in the center of the line so that it could command the open field.
Less than a mile to the north Houston had moved his troops into a thick woods and had placed his six-pounder cannon on the edge of the trees. On the afternoon of April 21 Houston assembled the soldiers and addressed them from horseback. The men were crowded together in the trees, their long rifles butt-down on the ground, pistols and knives stuck in their belts, flags furled on their staffs.
Son looked around him.
“Where’s Deaf at?” he said, because Deaf was never far from Houston unless he was scouting, and there was no need for a scout now.
“I seen him and Burnett ride out with a pair of axes this morning,” Hugh said.
“Up that rise waits the usurper and fifteen hundred of his troops,” Houston said. “They outnumber us two to one, but they have never been attacked before and they do not expect us to do it now. It is three-fifteen, they are in their siesta, and our attack will catch them in disarray. Each of us knows what will happen if we are not victorious today. The Mexicans will sweep through east Texas and devastate the colonies with torch and sword. They must not leave the field. Remember the Alamo, remember Goliad, and think of the fate of our loved ones if the usurper is not destroyed this afternoon. As civilized men we have followed the ways of mercy, even in war, but they must not be allowed to spend one more day at their evil design on our soil. If your heart is faint at what we must do, remember the Alamo. Let that be your cry when you meet those who ask for what they never gave themselves. Remember the Alamo. Remember the Alamo. Remember the Alamo.”
The lines of infantry formed on the edge of the woods, and the cavalry under Colonel Sherman and Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar moved out on the flanks. The sunlight was dazzling on the field, and a warm breeze was blowing off the river. Houston gave orders that no one was to fire until told to do so, and no one was to shout out until the enemy was actually engaged. The flags were unfurled, the rifles pulled back to half-cock, and a fifer and drummer stood immobile behind the switching tail of Houston’s horse. Then Houston waved his hat forward, and the line advanced while the drummer and fifer played “Will You Come to the Bower I Have Shaded for You?”
Son’s mouth was dry and his hands made wet stains on his rifle stock. He didn’t know if what he felt inside him was fear or expectation, but when he tried to focus his eyes through the haze on the Mexican camp and the field piece he knew was on the top of the rise, beads of sweat distorted his vision and made the whole field shimmer with refracted light. He ran his thumb over the flint screwed in his hammer and wondered if the edge was too thin and would break when it struck the steel by the flashpan. He had prayed seldom since he went to prison, but now the words to the “Our Father” came disjointedly to his mind. There was not a sound from the field except the song of the fifer and drummer. He looked at Hugh’s face, and it was gray and as tight as a drumhead.
“Why ain’t they shot yet?” he said. His words were full of phlegm.
“Don’t worry. It’s going to come at us like somebody opened the door to hell,” the rider next to him said.
Then the Mexican twelve-pounder roared on top of the rise, lurching upward on its carriage in a cloud of dust, and a cannon ball arched whooshing out of its trajectory overhead and crashed into the woods behind them. A gunner poured water from a wooden bucket down the barrel, and another man rammed the swabbing rod inside. Puffs of musket smoke exploded from the breastworks and drifted out into the field, and beyond Son’s line of vision he could hear the Mexicans yelling in camp. The gunners loaded another twelve-pound ball with a powder sack attached to it and were screwing down the elevation on the cannon.
Oh God, we’re going into it point-blank, Son thought.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Deaf galloping across the field with an axe held above his head.
“Vince’s Bridge is down. Vince’s Bridge is down,” he shouted.
“There ain’t no way out of here now,” Hugh said.
The cannon roared again, and this time Son could see the wave of heat flatten the grass in front of the barrel’s mouth. Behind him a geyser of dirt exploded into the air, and a rider and his horse were left twisted and quivering on the edge of the crater. The breastworks were no more than sixty yards away now, and the Mexicans were firing and reloading furiously in relays. Musket balls popped and crisscrossed through the air, and the gunners were ramming grape down the cannon barrel.
The man next to Son had his reins clipped in half by a ball. He stared at the slack leather in his hand, then as he looked quizzically at the breastworks a rose petal burst between his eyes, his jaw fell open, and he toppled sideways from the saddle onto Son’s horse.
“All right, give it to them,” Houston yelled. “Infantry kneel and fire. Kneel and fire. Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”
The first line of infantry knelt and fired a ragged volley into the breastworks, and a second line rushed into place beside them, knelt in the grass and fired, while the first reloaded. Then they rushed screaming up the slope into the Mexican guns.
Son and Hugh were with Lamar’s cavalry, and they charged the Mexican flank by the marsh. As Son’s horse labored up the incline, he could see the faces of the Mexicans in the smoke behind the breastworks. They were terrified. They were firing too fast and shooting high, and some of them had already started running for the rear. He threw his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at a soldier who was rising from his knees, and pulled the trigger. The ball tore through the soldier’s chest, then Son felt his horse’s hooves clatter over the logs and piled dirt at the top of the embankment.
“Holland’s inside! Damn it, get over the top with him! Ride right over them!” he heard Lamar shout behind him.
The Mexican camp was chaos. Many of the Mexicans had been asleep when the first shots were fired, the cavalry had been watering their horses down by the river, and the ammunition wagons were far back from the breastworks with no oxen yoked to them so that a soldier had to run to the rear when he was out of ammunition. Loose horses and mules galloped in panic through the camp, knocking down tents and stacked rifles and colliding into groups of running men. The Texians poured over the breastworks, swinging their rifles like axes and slashing at heads with swords and bowie knives.
Son felt his horse go out from under him, and he fell headlong on the body of a Mexican soldier. He knelt in the smoke, the ramrod in his teeth, his hands shaking, and tried to pour powder from his horn down the barrel. Thirty yards away he could see two Mexicans aiming at him through the smoke. Then he heard Hugh’s Colt fire three times above him.
“You’ll get killed trying to reload. Get your ass up here,” Hugh said.
Son put his foot in the loose stirrup and swung up on the horse’s rump. To their left they saw a Texian stand back from the Mexican twelve-pounder and throw a burning piece of firewood behind it. “That stupid sonofabitch is blowing the magazine,” Hugh said.
The explosion blew a fountain of dirt, splintered logs, and parts of the dead gunners fifty feet in the air. The cannon lurched forward on its carriage and toppled down the slope.
“Start busting skulls. We’re going right into them,” Hugh said.
Hugh charged his horse into a group of fleeing Mexicans and shot one man through the neck. Son swung his rifle by the barrel with one hand, holding on to Hugh’s waist with the other, and caught a Mexican across the back of the head with the stock. The man fell on his hands and knees, and Hugh jerked the reins around and rode his horse over him.
The Mexicans who had fallen back from the breastworks were now surrounded on all sides with the marsh at their backs. Others, some barefoot, were running across the plain toward Vince’s Bridge. In the clouds of smoke and dust Son saw a man in pantaloons with a head like a cannonball trying to catch up a horse that had a slipped saddle on it.
“It’s him,” he said.
“Damn if it ain’t!” Hugh sawed back the reins, cocked, aimed the Colt with both hands, and yelled out at the same time: “Landry! It’s Hugh Allison!” Then he fired.
“You missed. Shoot again.”
“I’m empty.”
Hugh threw his leg over the horse’s head and dropped to the ground. He tore a rifle out of the hands of a soldier who had just reloaded.
“What the hell are you doing?” the soldier said.
Hugh knelt on one knee and squeezed off the trigger into the drifting smoke. The recoil almost knocked him down. The shot was high, and Emile Landry swung onto the horse and raced down the far slope with the slipped saddle flopping under the horse’s belly. Hugh threw the rifle against the soldier’s chest.
“You dumb bastard. You must have put a half-horn in there,” he said.
Mexicans were stumbling into the marsh, struggling against the sand and soft mud that sank them up to their knees. Many of them couldn’t swim, and as they went deeper into the water toward the river they put their hands high in the air and begged for quarter. But the Texians waded after them, firing point-blank into their faces or bayoneting them as they tried to push away the Texian muskets with their hands. The screams from the marsh were terrible, and the water along the sandy bay was diffused with pink.
The command tent in the center of the camp was still standing. A soldier ripped down the Mexican tricolor flag from the staff and started to tear it under his foot.
“Don’t do that,” Lamar, the cavalry officer, said. “We’ll save it for those who thought we were more jackrabbit than soldier.”
He threw back the flap on the tent. The bedclothes were pulled halfway off the cot, and a small folding night table which had held a water pitcher, a bowl of fruit, and a diary had been knocked into the corner.
“It looks like Santa Anna had him a right expensive siesta,” Hugh said.
“Well, he won’t be hard to find. Just look for the fellow that forgot to put his britches on,” Son said.
They walked back out of the tent, and Lamar flung the flap in disgust.
“Don’t laugh, gentlemen,” he said. “Everything we’ve done here means nothing if Santa Anna escapes from us now.”
The shooting had almost stopped in the marsh, and bodies whose uniforms were puffed with air floated in the dead current and hung in grotesque positions among the tree trunks. But the firing was still heavy on the plain where the Texians were chasing the Mexicans toward Vince’s Bridge. Son and Hugh reloaded their weapons; Son caught up a saddled horse, and they rode down off the slope onto the plain with other cavalry toward Buffalo Bayou.
Green horseflies had already started to hum over the Mexican dead who were scattered over the ground for two miles. Son saw the barefoot body of a man in gray pantaloons and filthy white shirt lying facedown in the grass. There was a deep saber slash through his back that exposed his ribs. Son dismounted and turned him over with his foot.
“You know him?” he said.
“I seen him once. He brought some boys into camp in the jail wagon.”
“You two better stop thinking about looting and start popping some caps,” a soldier next to them said. “Houston and Deaf are pushing a whole bunch of them back in the trees by the bayou.”
A Mexican officer had gotten some control over his men and had formed them into a firing line on the edge of the woods. Son and Hugh galloped their horses into Houston’s advancing line, and they could see dozens of Mexicans crouched behind the tree trunks and the dirty puffs of smoke that exploded into the sunlight and flattened in the breeze.
“Where the hell you been?” Deaf said.
“Trying to slip a pig-string on Santa Anna.”
Houston’s horse had five rifle holes in it, and there was a tear in his trousers and a long area of scarlet that ran down his leg.
“General, you’re bleeding like a stuck hog,” Hugh said.
“Move on the trees, boys. They’re almost finished.”
Then his horse collapsed under him. Deaf and Son were immediately on each side of him with their hands under his arms. They pulled him to his feet, and he held his leg stiffly off the ground as though it were set with a splint.
“Get me another horse and attack. Don’t waver now. The field is ours.”
Corporal Burnett, whose face was burned and puckered from a powder flash, brought up another horse, and they helped Houston into the stirrup.
“Set this one out, Sam. We’ll push them into the water in fifteen minutes,” Deaf said.
“Form to me! Form to me!” Houston shouted, waving his hat at the mounted men and infantry on each side of him. “Run them to the bayou, boys. They’re too frightened to shoot straight now.”
Then he whipped his hat on the horse’s rump, and the line charged forward toward the trees. Son felt his shirt jump, and he looked down and saw a hole where a ball had passed through the cloth just above his old wound. Deaf was waving a Mexican broadsword over his head as though he were generating enough energy in his arm to fell a tree with a single stroke. Hugh was already firing his Colt, the explosions and splintered lead from the chambers singeing the hair on his horse’s head. Just as they crashed through the underbrush on the edge of the trees, the Mexicans who still had loaded guns fired their last volley and ran for the bayou. A Mexican corporal was stumbling backward from Son, stabbing frantically at the horse with his bayonet. Son stood in the stirrups and fired downward, and the ball splintered the man’s rifle stock apart in his hands and left him openmouthed and atrophied with fear until Son’s horse knocked him reeling into a tree.
The Mexicans who were not bayoneted or clubbed to the ground in the woods ran down the muddy bank of the bayou, splashed through the shallows, then fell suddenly into deep water where they thrashed their arms wildly against the pull of their bandoliers and tight jackets. Then the Texians emerged from the tree and took aim.
“Give quarter!” Houston shouted. “They’re quit.”
The soldiers lowered their rifles and looked back at him.
“Some of them out there is zapadores, General. They was at Bexar,” one man said.
“They’re now our prisoners,” Houston said. “Deaf, ride to Vince’s Bridge and give my order.”
“They’re going to be hard to stop, Sam.”
“The order is to give quarter to all who lay down their arms.”
“Tell them they better stop wasting shot on these assholes and catch that sonofabitch Santa Anna,” Hugh said.
The Mexicans in the bayou were told in Spanish to wade ashore. Their eyes were wide with fright, and some of the Texians repeatedly cocked the hammers of their rifles. Deaf rode off toward the firing that still came from Vince’s Bridge. The Texians picked up the Mexican weapons that were scattered through the woods and marched their prisoners into the field. Son and Hugh were in the rear, and a soldier in deerskin clothes with a Mexican sword in his belt walked beside them. He was looking ahead at Houston and chewing on a small twig in his mouth.
“I wonder if I ought to tell the general about it,” he said.
“About what?” Son said.
“I killed a fellow back there that don’t seem to belong here.”
“Get that stick out of your mouth and make sense,” Hugh said.
“He wasn’t no soldier. Maybe he was a spy. I didn’t have time to pull out his pockets. A Mexican come out from behind a tree and liked to took my head off with a rock.”
“Show him to us,” Son said.
“We’re going to get separated from the others. This woods is still full of half-crazy Mexicans.”
“You can ride up with me. Where’s he at?” Son said.
The soldier led them back through the trees to the bayou. They saw the pantalooned legs of a man sticking out from behind a willow tree toward the water’s edge. The man was seated upright against the trunk, his round head cleaved nearly in two. One palm was turned upward on his thigh like a gargoyle’s claw, and his index finger was pointed outward in the same direction as his empty eyes. A cap and ball pistol lay by his foot.
As Son looked at the destroyed face, he also saw the face of the brother strangling above the chain that twisted into his throat.
“I run up on him out of the brush, and when I seen he wasn’t no soldier I was going to tell him to lay down on his stomach. But he come up with a pistol, and I slit his skull. You reckon I ought to tell Deaf or the general?”
“He don’t mean nothing to nobody now. We done whupped them,” Hugh said.
“What’d you want to see him for, then?”
“You might have had Santa Anna there, boy,” Hugh said. “But this ain’t him. I seen Santa Anna myself once. He looks like a frog. This fellow was probably some kind of spy.”
They rode back out of the trees into the field. The wind was blowing stronger now, and the acrid smell of the battle had dissipated in the cool afternoon air. The sunlight glinted on the brass of the six-pounders against the green of the woods where the attack had begun, and a Texian flag was flapping on top of the Mexican breastworks. Toward Vince’s Bridge they could see a long column of prisoners being marched back to the Mexican camp. Suddenly, Son realized how thirsty he was, but when he reached for the canteen that had been tied to the back of his saddle he saw that the strap had been cut.
“Take mine,” the soldier on the horse’s rump said.
Son pulled the wood plug from the canteen and drank until the water poured from his lips.
“You drink like that was whiskey,” the soldier said.
The water ran down his chin and neck and over his dusty chest, and as he lifted the canteen higher he thought he could see the whole landscape, the breastworks, the blackened crater where the Mexican cannon had been, the ground strewn with dead men and horses, the violent green of the trees in the distance tilt upward into the shimmering sky, as though it all were being pulled over the earth’s edge.
THE TEXIANS REFUSED to bury the Mexican dead. Their bodies swelled and blackened under the sun, their distended stomachs bursting the buttons on their uniforms, and at night wild hogs came out of the woods and tore them apart.
On the day after the battle three Texas soldiers chasing a deer found a terrified Mexican in civilian clothes hiding in a canebrake by the bayou. He wept and kissed the hand of the sergeant who captured him and said that he was a private in the army of Santa Anna. When the soldiers took him back to Houston’s camp the other Mexican prisoners rose to their feet and began to call out “El presidente.” Within minutes a mob of Texians, some carrying coiled ropes, formed around the oak tree where Santa Anna stood shaking before Houston, who lay propped against the tree trunk with his wounded leg held stiffly out in front of him. One man who had escaped execution at Goliad was already tying a hangman’s knot in his rope.
But Houston addressed Santa Anna as an equal and had his surgeon give him a piece of opium to hold in his cheek. The language between the two was that of diplomat and negotiator, and Houston even restrained his temper when Santa Anna denied responsibility for the murder of James Fannin and his soldiers at Goliad. The battles, massacres, and burning of towns from Bexar to the San Jacinto River seemed to be slipping away into an abstraction in front of the men who had survived them. As Son and Hugh looked at the muted anger of the other soldiers, dripping weapons in their animal-skin clothes, their wind-burned faces reheated and caught forever with an unsatiated revenge, they felt that a fierce collective spirit even greater than the war it had created to sustain itself was ending here, unfairly, too soon, in the breathless and humid air.