by Jeff Long
Houston doubted it, but didn't waste his breath saying so. Bowie was nothing but a con artist. His greed for land and money would have been extraordinary if not for all the other world-class opportunism going on in Texas. Bowie cared for one thing: Bowie. That was straight from the horse's mouth.
Houston could hear it still. Floating drunk upon the Mississippi, his head full of suicide and Eliza, Houston had come upon Bowie and two mountain men in a riverside den. That would be '28, maybe '29. The date was out of reach, but Houston couldn't forget that fleshy face with stones for eyes and a reptile's philosophy. Vm the center, Bowie had declared from a throne of pressed beaver pelts with his own vomit on his bare feet and a loaded pistol in the hand without a bottle. / can stop the Mississippi. I can erase the sky. One bullet into my brainpan and I can stop the dream cold. And every one of you bastards dies with me. He'd gone on like that all evening, waving the pistol, threatening to destroy the universe. After that Houston had never entertained suicide again. Nor believed Bowie's threats.
"Those walls are worthless," Houston said. "That's why I ordered the Alamo abandoned. The forts are beyond our capacity to supply them." He looked up and marched from eye to eye.
"Goddamn it, Houston," Wylie objected. His overgrown eyebrows looked like an explosion. "The presidios are our western front. Without Goliad and the Alamo there is no line."
"There never was a line," Houston quietly replied. "The Alamo was never a real presidio. And besides that, Goliad is gone." He let the notion of disappearance sink in.
"Gone?"
"In effect. My order went out to Colonel Fannin this morning. He is to spike his cannon and destroy the presidio and fall back to meet us. Immediately."
"Destroy Goliad?"
The very thought of it staggered them, all of them, passing like a bolt of lightning through a herd of cattle.
"No, sir," another man declared.
It was John Wharton, a dark-eyed firebrand who had practiced some law with, and against, Travis. It seemed that every lawyer in Texas had gunpowder for brains . . . and Travis for a friend. Houston was not surprised by his excitability. "Fannin will never give up the presidio," Wharton stated. "Not to Santa Anna. Not to you. Not the Fannin I know."
"Then Fannin will be court-martialed," Houston quietly delivered to them.
The colonels didn't care for that one bit.
"You can't mean to court-martial Travis and Bowie, too,"
Wharton challenged. "They are heroes. They've captured the imagination of the people."
If they had survived their battle at the Alamo and he could ever get his hands on them, Houston thought it might be most fitting to just shoot them out of hand. Goddamn them for not blowing up their pile of mud and falling back. Bowie and the young maniac Travis had deliberately disobeyed his orders. They had stayed in their forts showboating with their own command. As a direct consequence of their hubris they had sailed off the edge of the world with some hundred and eighty men in that worthless mission corral.
"Heroes? They're insubordinate and fools," Houston said. "Their recklessness borders on treason."
"So you say, Houston. But those brave men are holding the line." Wylie Martin returned to his theme. "They are occupying the forts."
"The forts are coffins."
"Goddamn you, Houston." They seemed stuck, unable to conceive this fight without those stone anchors.
"Goddamn the forts," Houston retorted.
"But what of Fannin?" Colonel Forbes asked with poorly disguised guile. "Where have you told him to rendezvous with us?" It was a backdoor question, not at all naive. Forbes was trying to elicit Houston's direction for the army.
In a way, Houston didn't mind if Fannin never showed up, though he didn't say so out loud. The man's incompetence ran dead even with his plantation arrogance. So far as Houston knew—and he prayed it was true—Fannin was the sole instance of a West Point education in Texas. Personally Houston despised the very concept of a national military academy. It was tantamount to taking the eggs of a dunghill fowl and sneaking them into an eagle's nest. No, there was only one way to learn war and that was by surviving war, though at this rate, with men like Bowie and Travis and Fannin in command positions, there was going to be no one left to learn anything.
"Not here," Houston told them. "And not at the Alamo."
"Then where?" Wharton demanded.
Houston laid down his knife and stick and pulled a rolled map from his saddlebags. It was a copy of the same map of Texas that Stephen Austin had drawn and given to the Mexican government as a gift, the same one Santa Anna would now
employ to hunt the Americans down. He threw it into the middle of the room. "Since you insist, my answer lies in there."
"So you refuse to help our beleaguered comrades and you think to destroy our forts." Wylie trembled. "What else do you propose, sir?"
"I don't propose a thing," Houston said.
Wylie fixed him with a withering glare. "You may sleep the day away, Houston. But I warn you, we are men of action."
Someone had peeked through the shack wall and seen him napping that morning, then. But Houston wasn't bothered that his officers were spying on him. It meant the colonels didn't yet know what to make of him. Just the same Wylie's threat was not an idle one. Several of these very officers had mutinied against Burleson last fall.
"Gentlemen." Houston sighed. "I don't mind your company. But you'll need to excuse my participation. Somewhere in here," and he held his whittling stick to the light, "there is an animal waiting to be released. I can feel it all ready to leap out. But it's going to take some concentration for me to find the proper contours." That said, he sat in the dirt against one wall and returned to his whittling and would not talk.
Wylie and Wharton and a few others stamped off to continue their plotting. Several stayed on, though. Whether to curry favor or satisfy their curiosity or just to show they weren't part of any conspiring, at least not yet, Forbes and Sherman and Williamson and Mosely Baker made themselves at home. Finally, with nothing else to do, they unrolled the map of Texas and pinned it flat with rocks. It showed a crescent of land curving along the Gulf with tiny towns bearing American names along the eastern rivers and tiny towns with Spanish names on the western rivers. Above the 31st parallel there wasn't much of anything to show, because the northern reaches were largely unexplored.
Before long, the colonels were boldly reconfiguring the map. Houston listened with bemused disbelief as the men proceeded to draw Texas with wilder and wilder strokes. Shucking his crutch and sprawling beside the map, Three-Legged Willie declared that Texas needed more elbow room than to stop at the Nueces River, the traditional border between Texas and its neighboring state Coahuila.
"Nueces, hell," he said. "I say the Rio Grande is more fitting
for a region of Anglo-Saxon. We are a bigger, more vital people." In his day Burr had dreamed similar wild dreams, from snatching New Orleans to stealing Texas to conquering Mexico herself and crowning himself an emperor, Aaron I. His soldiers had called themselves colonists, no different from these colonels stabbing at Houston's map.
It was Forbes's turn next, then Burleson threw in. Before they were done the colonels had pushed the western border of Texas all the way to the Pacific Ocean and north most of the way through Canada. The only thing restraining their reach was water and the northern ice. They talked of invading deeper Mexico, driving all the way to Mexico City and her gold. As he listened to them, Houston thought he'd fallen into one of Swift's tales of human folly.
At last the colonels tired of Houston's taciturn company and drifted away. The afternoon stretched on. The rain returned. Houston lay on his horse blanket on the floor and stared up at the dripping ceiling, trying to decide what to tell the army and the townspeople. He wanted to give them hope and at the same time kill their hope. He wanted to put wings on their ferocity, but also to rope them tight and keep them safe. He wanted to tell them about the Alamo even though he didn't know anything
to tell them.
All he had was this idea called Texas. And yet for all his faith in ideas, he didn't trust them, and if he didn't, why should anyone else? An idea didn't have the weight of a penny. It was something that traveled with you anywhere, like a star in the night sky or like notions of east or west or high or deep. It was forever out there, no matter what few inches of dirt you were standing on. You could wander all over the earth with an idea and still be nowhere. Sometimes Houston wondered why he was here at all.
At long last, at five o'clock that afternoon, Deaf Smith arrived, escorting two Tejanos who were on horseback. One was young and scared by the crowd of several hundred men who billowed up from the woods and street, massing to hear their story. The other was tall, probably a generation removed from living the cannibal life-style of his Karankawa ancestors.
"I found them hiding in the chaparral south of San Antonio," Smith explained to Houston at the entrance to the shack.
"What news?" a soldier shouted out. Houston saw several
of his officers approaching and some of the town women were nosing their way through the crowd.
"Bring those two men inside," Houston said to the scout, "and you two soldiers," he addressed a pair, "you make sure no one gets in through this door. Understand?" Then he shut the door and closed the army and town folk out. There was no fire in the fireplace, but Smith and the two Tejanos gathered there anyway.
"It's like you said," Smith said. "Santa Anna overran the Alamo a week ago."
"With what casualties?" Houston asked. "Tell me the wounded first." If the dead and wounded amounted to even 50 percent of the Alamo garrison it would be too many. What little morale his army had left after a week of stasis would disintegrate. He was praying the numbers were low and Travis and the majority of his band had been captured.
"There weren't any wounded," Smith said.
Houston's spirit lifted, though the rational part of him knew it was impossible to have a battle without wounded. There were always injuries, if only from powder burns on a soldier's hands.
"Every man died," Smith said.
"Every man?" Houston's throat clenched tight. There were always survivors. He'd said so himself. "How can that be?"
"It just is."
The scope of Smith's news dazzled Houston. He couldn't fathom such a battle. Even at Horseshoe Bend where the Red Sticks had refused Jackson's offers to surrender, even there where the killing had been so utterly compressed, there had been survivors.
"Tell me what they say, Mr. Smith," Houston said, mostly because he couldn't think of where to begin asking questions. His fingers traced in and out of the carved sunburst. What can I tell them? But it was up to him to transcend the shock. He had to forge the information to his advantage. He was their general. "Start at the beginning," he told the scout.
Deaf Smith asked something in Spanish, his voice high and singsong.
"They are vaqueros, and they live around San Antonio. I know this one," he said pointing at the tall man, "not this one. They say they were hiding from the Mexican sorteo. The draft.
The battle took less than an hour and a half. It was finished before the sun came up. They say that Mexican soldiers who fought in the battle told them that Colonel Travis shot himself in the head, that Colonel Bowie died in bed, possibly by his own hand, and that seven prisoners were taken, then executed." The Alamo—mauled into American control only last December— was once again in President Santa Anna's hands.
"Ask them about the burying," he said. Deaf Smith put the question to the younger boy in fast Spanish. He got part of an answer.
"They took the Mexicans to Campo Santa. That's the cemetery." To be sure Houston understood, Smith reminded him. "The Catholic cemetery. Consecrated ground."
Houston didn't begrudge the old scout his religiosity. They all had their destinies to obey, and loving a Catholic wife was a destiny, too.
"And the American dead?" he asked.
The younger Tejano told Smith in a very quiet voice.
"They couldn't be put in holy ground."
"I know that," Houston said. "Where did they get put?"
"They got gathered," Smith translated. "One layer wood, one layer man. Up and up. Then it got fired. Anselmo here, he says the flame went five hundred feet high. He says it burned for three days and nights."
Houston took it all in. He was aware of cremation in other societies and among some of the tribes. But most Americans hearing this would go cold. Fire was for Inquisition purposes, not for burying human beings, not white ones anyhow. He couldn't have invented horror better than Santa Anna had just handed him. They were Go Ahead folk, these Anglo-Saxons. For fifteen years now they'd been struggling to shape this corner of Mexico in their own image. They stubbornly believed Texas had opened her prehistoric arms to them, that she had invited their powerful hand, their radical voice, their ax and gun, their seed . . . cotton and otherwise. Every one of them had arrived white hot with Texas fever. In a way, thought Houston, it was only natural they should end as ash.
"Does anyone else in Gonzales know what we've just heard?" Houston asked.
"Just us two and them two," Smith said.
"Then let us keep the secret." He needed time to absorb the tragedy, time to shape his words, his plans.
The secret held for less than an hour. At sunset a shriek pierced the town and shortly afterward the sound of women wailing told Houston that the wives now knew they were widows. Under the quarter moon more than a hundred men fled from town. Colonel Burleson came at two o'clock in the morning to tell him so.
"By morning you may have no army," Burleson warned him.
"Let them go," Houston said and turned over on his blanket. It wasn't hard guessing which direction the deserters had gone, back to their homes to collect their families, those who had them, or else straight for the Louisiana border.
At dawn Houston came out of his shack and what was left of his army stood waiting. He found a pitch keg to stand on, then got up and faced them.
"Citizens of Texas," he spoke. They fell silent, for his was a voice that could throw a half mile without shouting. He could reach all the way into the cold pebble of a congressman's heart and yet not wake a sleeping baby.
"Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire," he called out to them. He listened to his mother's faraway echo, the Scripture, the sound of neighbors digging a grave for his father. He carried it up and gave them his grief. "Your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate."
"Desolate," some man in the crowd murmured.
"Yes," said Houston. "Overthrown by strangers."
The men bent to his words. They wanted to hear him. He saw the confusion and terror in their eyes. J. S. Neill's gaunt face was pale with turmoil, part grief, part ecstasy. He'd slipped death's talons by not being where he ought to have been. His look of horror and joy said he obviously hadn't decided what that meant. In the background, scarcely muffled by the clapboard, some of the widows were howling to Jesus.
Then Houston told them everything that was known about the Alamo battle, trying to dispel their wilder notions. He called them soldiers and defenders of the people.
"Is it true they split Bowie's jaw open and cut out his tongue and threw him alive on a fire?" someone yelled.
"Is it true they roasted our boys and ate bits of their flesh?"
"Just tell us when's our fight?" a sour man bellowed.
"We will fight, boys," Houston assured them.
"Where at?"
"We will fight," Houston repeated, "but it will be on our ground, not theirs."
"This y'ere's our ground," one shaggy fellow pronounced. He looked enormous in a shaggy buffalo robe. One eye was dead, part of a fleshy seam cutting from forehead to chin. The good eye glittered up at Houston, sly and brute, challenging. His hair hung in greasy braids ornamented with red and white beads. And then Houston saw the scalps. There were a half dozen of them sewed along the shoulders of the robe.
&n
bsp; "It's not our ground," Houston pointed out for the record, "not yet."
'Tis," the buffalo man responded. "And I say, slay them bastards y'ere." He grinned with black stumps for teeth.
Houston realized he was afraid of this man. And suddenly it struck him that he feared all of these men, even the boys. The recognition startled him. But this was no time to untangle the emotions. He had chaos to overcome.
"No, sir," Houston said, "they are many, and we are few. So we must find our place."
"Stand here, lads. Here's the place," the shout rose up. A gun went off into the air, then another. Some of the voices belonged to his officers. Worse, they stood scattered through the crowd, so that he couldn't see and silence them. The army was falling into panic and chaos.
"We must go from here," Houston said.
"Not east, by gad, or else," someone swore. Houston looked quick and it was Mosely Baker. He had a peculiar darkness in his face, a desperation Houston hadn't seen yesterday. His frontier rose was nowhere to be seen in the crowd.
"Else what, Colonel Baker?" Houston gently asked him.
Baker swiped one hand across his nose. Houston had caught him flat in the open. He grew quieter, if not less passionate.
"Give us our fight," Mosely said. "You'll find the whole army with you. We'll follow you to the very devil."
"I thank you," Houston said. "But the devil is not our direction."
"What then is our direction?" some other dark voice challenged from the crowd.
Houston reached into himself and found some calm. He didn't answer right away. Instead he waited. His eyes strayed up from the turbulence spreading all around his little raft of a keg. Out beyond, the sun lay sparkling on the eastern skyline, a momentary jewel between the dark jaws of earth and storm clouds. Houston felt the warmth on his face like a whispering in his ear.
"Why, we will go into the light," he replied simply.