by Jeff Long
Baker frowned. It occurred to him to turn and look at whatever Houston was looking at. When Baker saw the sun, he erupted.
"Now see here, General," Mosely started in. "Gonzales must be defended."
The babble of voices climbed. Men on horseback were wheeling in the background and flintlocks banged away at the emptiness. The army was slipping from Houston's hands and they'd barely begun their war.
Houston stepped down from his keg. He shouldered a channel through the tight pack of humanity straight through to the largest of the mess fires burning in the street. As if he were all alone and there weren't some three hundred men watching on, Houston took his time selecting just the faggot. It was a good six inches thick and four feet long and half its wood was blazing. Houston grabbed the torch and returned through the crowd, not particularly careful where he waved the flame. This time the men were quicker to open a way for him.
They gawked and grew more attentive, uncertain what their general had in mind. Trailing sparks and frost, Houston strode back to the little shack he'd called headquarters. Without a word he pitched the torch through the open door.
He'd prepared. The house was safely empty except for a pile of straw in the back. His rig and possibles were stored in a stable down the way.
The straw lit in a puff of orange fire. In no time the clapboard caught. Men scrambled to back away from the heat. Suddenly the roof burst into flame and big pieces of burning debris lifted over the crowd, then hit the cold air and pelted down. The mob scattered. Across the path, another roof caught on fire.
"Put the women and children in wagons," Houston shouted at them. He was risking everything. Only yesterday he'd cautioned them against burning novels. Today he was burning an entire town. There was no telling where this would end. "Pack your gear. We march east. Gonzales is no more."
The peculiar part was that Houston felt hope.
Chapter Four
For a week then more, Houston's army fled. It was like the Flood, a world of water, of rivers escaped, of the fields flooded, drowned cows dangling in the mangroves, of cottonmouths and other reptiles swimming loose and alligators with white mouths and a bold taste for man, and not just for slave children fishing and skipping rocks while they watered the beef, but for red-blooded Anglo-Saxon meat, too.
Squalls of hail and pea snow swept through in pitch darkness rattling in the branches like skeletons on the loose. The only good thing about the rain was that it washed the Alamo's death smoke from the air. Houston felt like he could breathe again. By day the mud trapped their feet and hooves and bogged their wheels. By night the cold plagued them and brought pneumonia and strep, killing two of the infants plus three soldiers already sick with lung diseases. One half of the McCavish twins woke to find the other half dead, his brother's face glazed with a mask of diamond ice.
With time the women and children went one way, north and east to catch the grandly named Camino Real, or King's Highway, which would take them to the Sabine River and Louisiana. The army went differently, straight east, just like in the Bible, east from Eden as if Houston had some definite destination in mind.
Day after day the cold rain lashed their backs, driving them on. They were being whipped from the Garden, Houston saw, all of them, punished for sins they had committed or were about
to. Like Adam thev bent their collective head in despair and trudged blindly into the wilderness. Like Cain thev raged against their exile and fought with one another even as thev fought the wilderness.
With the sun sunk deep in clouds their clockwork became a spectrum of gravs. lightest at noon. Their feet flowered with green moss inside their brogans. the ones who had them. Otherwise it was bare feet, soft and puckered and turning pale amphibian. Houston had one of the onlv pair of boots in the army, though a good deerskin moccasin would have been preferable because with his pants tucked into his boot tops, he collected more water than he shed. Every time he got off his yellow ponv to emptv his boots Houston had to pick slick black leeches from between each toe.
Back and forth, up and down. Houston rode his stout ponv through the red and black gravy, counting his soldiers with one finger. The total was never the same, but that had nothing to do with his arithmetic. They'd been marching for more than a week and his army had grown, but now it was melting away. At one point they'd numbered over eight hundred. But on Houston's verv next pass down the wagon trace the count had dropped bv a hundred. Todav the sum barely hit four hundred.
Men came and went as thev pleased. Scarcely a quarter of his armv had been in Texas for more than a few months or weeks. Thev had come to Mexico alone or in packs, with long teeth and flat bellies and an appetite for free land, between six hundred and twelve hundred acres depending on when they'd showed up and how long they'd signed on for. But until thev vanked it from Mexican hands these grand soldiers of fortune wouldn't own one stick or inch of Texas. Soaked, frozen and famished, many realized thev stood to lose nothing bv hightailing it back across the Louisiana border.
There was little to do about these hour-bv-hour "migrations." as Three-Legged Willie termed them. A few among the colonels demanded a set of executions to cure the desertion fever. "You got to make the troops fear vou more than thev fear the enemy,* 1 Colonel Wharton explained. He'd been ill lately and there was a cadaverous suck to his cheeks. "Then sir. then vou can call em an armv.'"
Houston considered a killing for the sake of discipline.
That's how Jackson would have done it and Houston had seen it work: the soldiers assembled, a quick shooting, an open gra e. Lord knew this rabble would only hear through its hack, and Houston knew it would be a mistake to spare the whip. But he wasn't Jackson. What am I capable of in the name of Texas? he wondered and looked around. What were they capable of?
Houston couldn't bring himself to shoot or hang a single deserter. For one thing, he couldn't square killing a runaway when the fact was thev were all runaways. The men themselves had taken to calling their backward march the Runaway Scrape.
More important the deserters were purifying his army with their absence. The men who remained were pulling together into a legion that was moved bv something larger than anv ol them, though not one in fiftv would have said so out loud. The most philosophical the troops got was to crow about the Livers thev meant to carve from Mexican soldiers and the helds thev would irrigate with Mexican blood. But as coarse and stupid djd violent and debased as so many were—or pretended to be—thev were reinventing themselves step bv step. Houston had faith in it. He believed as much as an adult could that thev were marching backward into innocence, and in a way the desertions simply confirmed the bigness of their quest. The more men dropped away, the higher the mountain proved to be.
"When do we turn and fight?" Wylie Martin demanded. It had become a dailv tax.
"Not here," Houston sighed.
"But we must draw a line. We must make a stand. We must fight." Very like a tombstone left too long in the elements. Wylie had a square, dour face bracketed with spikv curls. These days he seemed mostly held together with a whalebone corset and leather strings tied at each ankle and wrist to keep the leeches out or the life in. Except when he was hectoring Houston about their retreat Old Wylie kept his jaw locked tight, as if his surviving teeth might try and escape when he breathed.
"Not vet." Houston told him.
"We must."
"When Fannin joins us." Houston said, "maybe then." It was a sop he threw them. His colonels delighted in the possibilities. Thev knew that with Fannin's troops, the American army would swell to nearly a thousand. Strength would give them
options, and options were opportunities, and opportunities were Texas. The problem was no one knew where Fannin had disappeared to. After a dispatch from Goliad stating his retreat from the presidio was about to commence, Fannin had fallen into silence.
Mile by mile, Houston kept his army moving away from the enemy. The farther east they marched, the deeper they penetrated their own American construct. The zigza
gging wooden fences, the brick-lined wells, the square wooden houses, even the livestock spoke of a familiar order. No round-cornered adobes or twigjacales here, nor brindled range cattle with wide gutting horns, nor small Spanish ponies that could live like goats on the wild fescue, nor Mexican corn with its soft white kernels.
They came upon American houses and American towns and words printed in English on American printing presses and fields ripped neat with American plows and corn grinders nailed to trees and a cotton gin built along the river and blacksmith anvils and cooper's rings and a surveyor's tripod and a hundred other things that spoke of who they were and where they'd come from. Ordinarily the sights would have buttressed their morale.
But there were no people.
Everywhere they went they found emptiness and lonely hounds and cats that ran up mewing. The houses were occupied all right, but by huge hogs that had broken open the doors to root and vandalize and by goats and dogs who slept on the corn-shuck mattresses. Houston was reminded of Circe's island where Odysseus had found the men magically changed into beasts.
Every settlement came out of the rain like cold blue burial grounds. Indeed, many seemed to have sprouted fresh graves with wooden crosses as if the cholera were making another sweep or the Mexicans had already come through. Even after Deaf Smith and Ned Burleson and other Texas veterans demonstrated that the new graves had been dug to fool the Mexican army and only contained settlers' buried possessions, not corpses, the soldiers remained skittish.
These were men schooled since childhood in backwoods taboos. It was a given that if they accidentally stepped across a grave, they would immediately jump back over it to reverse
their trespass. In a sense the entire army was jumping back over the Anglo-Saxon grave.
On and on they retreated and the further they marched the more they pillaged, burning the worm fences and homemade furniture and books for their heat and shooting milk cows for meat and looting smokehouses for pork bellies and smoked venison and in general erasing the Anglo-Saxon presence as they fell eastward.
Since ordinary flint sparks couldn't combust their damp tinder, they started fires by pouring a shot of gunpowder down the muzzle, then stuffing in a piece of dry rag saturated with more gunpowder and tamping it with the ramrod. Aiming at their pile of kindling, they triggered the charge and the rag shot out flaming, and they stuck it among the twigs and blew it to a blaze.
How strange, thought Houston. Like many, he'd heard Jim Bowie's tale of the golden bullets, about how a party deep in the Staked Plains up north had discovered a cache of Spanish doubloons. But upon running out of food they had been forced to chop the coins into bullets to shoot jackrabbits on their long hungry march back to civilization, and so had shot away their fortune. In a sense Houston's army was the logical extension of Bowie's wanderers, penniless, reduced to shooting bits of their own clothing and burning their own homes just to heat a few cobs stolen from the corn cribs. At this rate they would exit Texas naked as infants.
The army crossed the Lavaca and the Navidad rivers, forcing the passages. They found ferry rafts hidden in the brakes or else made them out of trees and pieces of houses, and Houston ripped his jacket on a hinge nail. If it was shallow enough they simply breasted the current. They forded creeks named Ponton and Mixon and Big Becky and Cedar and creeks that had no names because in ordinary times they weren't creeks at all, just dips and wrinkles in the land.
They got to the Colorado and found it swollen wider and deeper than anyone could remember. On the opposite bank Jesse Burnham's ferryboat rocked up and down on the nut-brown waters, and higher up the shore was a stone blockhouse, the trading post. They located the ferry horn dangling by a rawhide string from a giant willow with names carved in it.
While one man blew the horn, a few of the soldiers shielded their guns from the rain and carefully loaded powder and fired blank rounds. But neither Burnham nor any of his thirteen children came to the signals.
The army stood in the pelting rain and looked forlornly across at the boat. Sitting on their horses with the water sluicing down the manes and saddles and creases in their clothing, Houston and his colonels tried to figure things out.
"Where's that Jesse at?" Wharton groused. "Don't he know there's a war on?" He had a dashing white hat with one swept-up side to the brim, in the same fashion affected by Mosely Baker and their dead friend Travis. It was a beautiful hat, but it channeled water straight down the colonel's collar. As a direct consequence his cough was getting worse, but the hat stayed.
"Could be the Karanks finally got him, them or Coman-ches," Burleson postulated. He didn't like Indians and was famed for his savagery when he went rangering after them.
"Maybe the goddamn Cherokees went wild," Three-Legged Willie tossed in. That was aimed straight at Houston. The Cherokee were Houston's second family—third if you counted Jackson's embrace—and he was considered soft on hostiles because of it. After Old Hickory banished the Cherokee from the United States, one branch of the exiles had settled in the Red River country of upper Texas where they had demonstrated nothing but peaceful ways. Nevertheless men like Burleson and Willie couldn't wait to go raid and despoil them. They knew their talk bothered Houston.
"Is there any other way across?" he asked at large.
"There's Montezuma way," Burleson answered, which was the same as saying no. Montezuma lay a full day south. If Santa Anna was hunting them, he'd go straight for Montezuma. And even if he wasn't, Houston could take his army down and find no ferry there either.
"Can we get a man over to fetch that boat?"
"Don't we have no Meskins?" Wharton asked. "They can swim slick as fat."
"Juan Seguin's got all the greasers with him," Old Wylie said. "No telling where that pack is off to."
"There's a fellow in Baker's company," Colonel Forbes volunteered. "They say he's half fish."
"Bring him up then," Houston said.
Somebody found Robbie King, a gentle young cooper from San Felipe de Austin. "I hear you can swim," Houston said to him. King had long fingers and Houston wondered if that might not be his trick.
"It's true," King said.
"I'll give you a dollar if you can swim over," Houston said. He hoped the man wouldn't want more. All he had was two dollars.
King didn't answer right away. He screwed up his eyes, then took a handful of grass and threw it on the water and calculated the river's force. "A dollar and a league," he told Houston.
Houston didn't blink. A league amounted to more than four thousand acres, and while it was all meaningless until they owned it and he admired capitalism as much as the next man, still Houston didn't like the appearance of getting bested in a deal.
"A dollar and a mile," Houston said, then added, "soldier," just to remind the cooper he had certain martial duties. A mile was only 640 acres. The cooper was happy with it.
"I'll go get my horse," he said, for he meant to swim with his horse's help.
Even as they waited for Robbie King the storm slackened and a rainbow sprang up, generating a discussion among the slogging soldiers.
"Look it there," one soldier pointed. Their gloom fell away. "She's touching down along the Colorado." All of them knew rainbows sprang up from the finest soil.
"I'll take a place along here," said another. "It will be black, the earth. It will be a place to build a home. And I'll paint 'er white so as to bring my house out from the northers and contrast the piney barrens."
"First I'll plant me some corn," a stark fellow with a bulging goiter voiced. "Cotton later, or sugar, I don't know. But the corn first, yeah. Throw it down among the stumps."
Houston watched the men bend and pinch up the dirt under their feet. All along they had been paying as much attention to the ground as to their looming enemy. They tasted the dirt for the presence of salts. They smelled it for its minerals. Few would actually be farming it, but all meant to take chunks of this land to pass on to others, and the price would rise if they
could lay title to the sweetest soil available. Even in retreat these soldiers saw their fortune in the dirt.
Some men looked up, not down, to judge the ground, debating the tallness of trees or the density of fifteen-foot-high canebrakes. They were searching for hickory and sassafras and walnut, Houston knew, for those marked the best picking. They would know better than to believe in the Spanish oak which could grow in just about anything. The prairies were a complete loss, of course. Not one of them would trust a soil without trees.
With great animation and wisdom, they shared their alphabet of the earth. Black soil which cut like butter, which didn't stick or clump, which was short and light and broke into small clods, that was what they wanted, a soil as good as gold. But so far such a soil had eluded them. Either it was sandy-bottomed or slick with blond clay or mixed with iron, which would stunt the crops, or it had been "crayfish" soil, white and sterile. They'd crossed miles and miles of yellow sand, which had some life to it, it was true. But this was Texas and they'd come to seat King Cotton on the richest blackest throne they could find. They wanted only the best.
"Bless you poor bastards," Houston whispered to them. All the while the rain pocked the thick brown river with rapid dimples.
At last Robbie King was ready. He showed up buck naked on a bareback roan and seemed to know his business. Except for a hickory switch he had no equipment, not even reins or a bit for the horse.
The cooper directed his mount upriver a hundred yards, estimating the eddies and curls and Houston didn't know what else. Picking a place, he entered the water slowly. For maybe thirty feet the roan kept her footing on the riverbed, then the current took them and man and horse began to swim. While the horse moved her legs underwater, King paddled on top of it with cupped hands.
To Houston's surprise, the cooper and his roan actually gained distance through the thick muddy water. They were three-quarters across by the time the current brought them opposite the army. Another fifteen yards or so and the pair of swimmers would touch the far shore.