by Jeff Long
"A lucky guess," Houston said. Houston hadn't known
which regiments would come, nor that it would be Gaines for sure, nor even that U.S. troops would actually get called up to the border. But Jackson had intimated it. The stratagem was loaded with risk, not the least of which was Jackson's presidency and an international war between the United States and Mexico.
"What do you know?" Rusk asked. As secretary of war, it was his right to ask. But as Jackson's confidant, Houston didn't have any right to answer.
"I'm sorry," Houston said. Rusk did what he could not to look hurt by the secret. Houston truly was sorry, too. Rusk was right, he did need a friend.
"Do you know which companies?" Houston asked.
Rusk withheld nothing, possibly to shame Houston, which it did. "The word is they're from the Sixth Regiment. Twelve hundred of them. Red hot from fighting Seminoles and Creeks in Florida."
"Excellent," Houston said. These would be combat troops and regulars, not a whimsical pack of mercenaries, squatters, and colonists playing soldier boy.
"We could take all of Texas if Gaines crossed the border," Rusk said, probing Houston's reserve.
Houston didn't budge. He knew too much, including the fact that Gaines's presence on the Sabine guaranteed nothing. For one thing, Edmund Gaines was a wily career officer and an old crony of Andy Jackson's, meaning he played games within games. And for another thing, if American troops crossed the international line it would constitute an act of war. Such technicalities had never slowed Gaines or Old Hickory in the past, of course. The two of them hadn't hesitated to invade the Spanish Floridas back in '18, even though it had risked pitting an infant United States against the Spanish empire. From private conversations Houston had shared with both, he knew the old soldiers feared Mexico even less than Spain. But they needed a catalyst to invade. And that was Houston's job. Just as Travis had baited Houston to bring his army to the Alamo, Houston now had to try and bait Gaines to bring American regulars into Mexico.
"I think the best thing for us is to count on ourselves," Houston said. After that Rusk didn't bring up the subject again.
The army followed the Brazos River searching for a sanctuary. They'd been on their feet for weeks and needed to rest. A day north, Houston selected a ravine for his exhausted army.
It was an old riverbed on the west side of the Brazos, close to Jared Groce's big white house and slave shacks. Old Man Groce let them use his land for free, a patriotic contribution that had mostly to do with keeping the voracious army away from his plantation.
The ravine was deep and wide and out of sight and it was protected from surprise attacks by swollen creeks in all directions. But Houston knew it wasn't impregnable. The Brazos had a way of turning red as arterial blood after each rainstorm, and he feared the river might jump its banks upstream and flood the ravine and drown them all.
All the same they occupied the ravine for a week, then two weeks. Houston had come here to restore them and restore himself, but the longer they stayed the more he despaired. He had headaches for one thing. And what was left of his fingernails were cracked to the quick. His bowels were a battleground for dysentery and worms. Every time he doffed his tricorner there was hair in the brim, and every time he passed a hand across his head he found hair between his fingers. At this rate he was going to end up as bald as a baby.
Some of this had to do with the opium, of course. From half a lifetime of quaffing and chewing the bitter yellow rose, he knew the effects, good and bad. The diarrhea, the queasy mornings after, the headaches: Usually they were worth the release from pain, even when the pain changed into matters of the heart and midnight sweats. But lately he'd begun to question if the opium Dr. Labadie had given him wasn't magnifying his despair. It had grown almost out of his control. When Houston walked through camp that was all he felt, black defeat.
It wasn't that his men were slipping away from him, but that they were slipping away from themselves. His soldiers had become plastered with red mud. Their beards and hair and clothing were caked with it. They were losing all outward aspect of their humanity except for the eyes peering from their earthen masks—and those showed human only when they managed to get sober or healthy, which was more and more seldom.
They lived in filth and drank from a common pool in the pit of the ravine. It was bad enough the water was stagnant, but they fouled it further by pissing and washing their clothes and watering their livestock in it. All manner of debris floated in the pool, even gaseous white and purple guts of butchered cattle
and wild game. As a result, the whole camp quickly fell to overlapping plagues of whooping cough, mumps, measles, chicken pox, pinkeye, and diarrhea.
Not a day passed that someone else didn't die. Some mornings it was hard distinguishing between the dead and the living because so many men had worn out their clothing and had taken to wearing plantation shirts sold to them by Old Man Groce. Normally given out to slaves, these shirts were slit up the sides and made of cotton sacking, and in the present circumstances they looked exactly like shrouds for corpses. More than one man came awake when the daily burial detail went through camp and mistakenly grabbed him by the foot.
Memory was their sanctuary. They were an army of other lives, and with the presence of so much death they became an army of other deaths, safely distant, even wonderful. Houston listened to them through the walls of a tent sold to him by Old Man Groce.
"Remember Matthew Turpin?" Houston heard a man speak by a fire. "He was my cousin's grandpa and he got killed picking mulberries fifty years ago. Out along the Clinch River."
That prompted a second hungry man. "What about those Smith brothers at Palmyra, kilt when they went for strawberries."
"My great uncle Robert Ramsey," a third recalled, "he got an Indian hatchet whilst going for paw-paws and wild cherries and grapes along the Hartpeth near the Highland River."
They reached backward in time, thirsting for fresh milk from family cows or clear water from springs they hadn't seen for many years. "Before I die I dearly want for rosen vers," a soldier wished out loud, and Houston could practically taste the plump green corn his own mother used to fry up and serve with milk and butter.
What startled Houston most was how his grand army was being leveled by childhood diseases. Something about the notion gave an innocence to his primitive warriors. It lulled him. He felt almost fatherly, as if he were leading a children's crusade. It made his aging—the thinning hair, the broadening expanses of forehead, the rheumatism in the morning—more bearable. His soldiers did childish things, though every now and then he caught glimpses of something hard and mean and
even evil, and it made him wonder if he could be wrong about them.
One afternoon in broad daylight a boy in nut-brown homespun came running through camp shouting an alarm. He dashed pell-mell through the barnyard slop, planted himself in the middle of the camp, and screamed it loud.
"Meskins! The Meskins coming!"
Houston was sitting on a stump trimming his toenails with his clasp knife, idly contemplating whether his feet had always looked so flattened out and pawlike with toes gone nearly to claws. The latest norther had passed and its blue clouds had sunk off the Gulf horizon, leaving the afternoon bright and sultry with some tropical edge for a change. At this rate, he allowed, most of his clothes might actually dry out.
His first reaction to the alarm was flat annoyance. It seemed much too fine a day to waste on a fight. His second reaction was curiosity. For a camp about to get overrun by Santa Anna, the soldiers had all the calm of a plow horse on an August noon. Except for the highly animated harbinger, barefoot and shirtless and flapping his arms, hardly anyone was inclined to move at all.
Houston lowered his big foot to the cool mud. He scrutinized the camp. Over there beneath a tree stood a pocket of stationary officers swapping chew or gossip or land talk—or waiting for something about to happen—and none was about to relinquish the shade. Everywhere else men and boys went on loung
ing like they were deaf. Some were honing their butcher knives or counting, endlessly counting, their lead balls or trading for flints or reconfiguring muskets like good soldiers. There was a man carving himself a brand new rifle stock out of oak, shaping a cheek rest that was just right. Others catnapped under their slouch hats or were weaving palmetto into fanciful animals or jawboning while they whittled. But they were watching, those who bothered to wake up, all watching in a particular direction. Houston followed their eyes, just in time.
Abruptly Colonel Forbes burst from his tent. The man had obviously been deep asleep. His vest was open and his pants were falling and he looked nearly demented with panic.
It was impressive, the degree to which the colonel had memorized his escape route. As Houston and the entire camp
watched on, Forbes didn't bother to stop and assess the emergency. He didn't measure his soldiers' movements, didn't even take the time to estimate which way the enemy might be pouring in. He just went into action.
Wild eyed, his sandy muttonchops furred out like a scared cat's tail, Forbes sprang upon his mule. Obviously he'd placed the mule close for this very eventuality. He heeled its ribs with all he had. "Gee gaw, Maud," he yelled and with a snap whipped the reins against his mule's neck. "Gee gaw."
At some point in this furious display, the mule came awake and leapt to the flight. But her wings were clipped. Someone had hobbled the colonel's beast fore and aft and all poor Maud could do was hop around and try to keep her balance.
Forbes slashed the animal with the reins and pummeled her ribs with his bare heels and bellowed his get go, but all he gained was more frantic hopping. The mule realized the predicament before her master did and finally decided a complete halt was in order. The mule's stasis drove Forbes to greater frenzy. He whipped and goddamned and hammered at her, but she wouldn't bulge.
Meanwhile, the entire army looked on. They had planned the prank, unmistakably, but succeeded beyond all reason. The soldiers were too flabbergasted by Forbes's antics to even begin their laughter.
"Stop yourself, Colonel," Deaf Smith commanded Forbes from a nearby mess fire. He was wearing a disgusted frown.
The wildness in Forbes's eyes slowly burned out. He lowered his elbows and quit kicking and the terrible realization drained his face. The colonel sat there high atop his mule, too stunned to blink much less dismount.
Houston sighed a purling curse. The Cherokees had done something similar to him once, painting one of their Negro slaves with whitewash and dressing him in Houston's favorite bobcat skin vest and seating him in Houston's place at the tribal council. They had humiliated Houston for his drunken, visionary excesses. With their black clown they'd effectively banished him back to his own people.
Now it began for the man on the mule. Someone cried out, "Who rode off on a hobbled old Maud?"
And like a Greek chorus, men throughout camp answered
with one voice. "Colonel Forbes," they shouted boisterously. Their laughter washed back and forth.
Houston pitied the devastated colonel. They had chosen their victim with care. Besides being pompous and high-handed with the troops Forbes had been Houston's choice to oversee the army's commissary. It was Forbes's misfortune to have inherited an empty larder and an army that was as unforgiving as it was hungry. The reins had slipped to the ground and Forbes was staring at his open palms. He was paralyzed up there. No one could rescue him.
Houston returned to his trimming. He carved off the tip of another horny nail, then investigated his other toes. Goddamn them all. They wouldn't drill properly, they wouldn't follow orders, they wouldn't even clean away their own filth. They shit in the very water they drank. The joke on Forbes had turned out more cruel than it should have, mostly because of Forbes himself. All the same their brutality appalled Houston.
Some part of him had hoped that by his garrisoning the men in one place they would become more civilized. Wasn't that how history worked? The nomad settled. Cities grew. Poetry and science blossomed. But his army had only gotten more insubordinate and bestial. At night when he paced through the camp unable to sleep, Houston had even heard some of the soldiers rutting with the livestock, something farmboys did, not grown men. They were slipping into pandemonium here and he was becoming less and less certain they could ever crawl out of their muddy red pit.
It became plain to him. Houston was no longer sure he wanted to be their general. He didn't dare to share the realization, not even with Tom Rusk. Early on, Houston had feared the army would consume him with its desires. But it was Texas herself that was eating him alive. His only salvation lay in fleeing from their descent. And yet, like Crockett who had never wanted to go to the Alamo but went anyway—and stayed— Houston knew he couldn't leave. He had nowhere else to go.
He had nothing to show for his forty-three years on this earth—no child, no money, no home, no legacy, no wife, no land, no country, even that. In order to gain his acres of free land, he'd renounced his American citizenship, given up his faith, and been baptized a Roman Catholic Mexican: Samuel
Pablo Houston. Like so many other men shipping from New Orleans or swimming the Sabine River, he had signed away his nation of birth in order to get a foothold in Texas. Unlike most, the sacrifice bothered Houston. He worried they might have given up too much of themselves, and that was before losing what they'd thought to be getting.
Travis had once yipped something about their deceptions being camouflage, that they were like chameleons who'd turned brown so they could turn Texas white. But to Houston that conjured an image of snakes shedding their very skins for the chance to get within striking distance. Well, they had made their strike and they had missed, and there was no hole left to slither back to except the country they'd renounced. We're poorer than we know, Houston thought. We have damned ourselves to Texas.
They could return to the States, but it would be to carry on as twilight creatures living between the margins of night and day. Years ago Houston had met Aaron Burr upon a porch. Desiccated with age and bitterness and the failed chance, the old traitor had clung to his wicker seat like a bat in a cage, sipping mint juleps and staring out at the world with black beads for eyes, the soul gone out of him. Houston had shuddered at Burr's terrible fate, never imagining he might face it himself one day.
Then something happened that returned Houston to himself and to his army. It started early one morning with the whole camp waking in terror because the earth was quivering under their heads. Desperate men screamed out that a trembler was about to wreck them, and it did feel like the great 1811 earthquake of their youths which had toppled chimneys and knocked cabins to pieces, when the waters of the Mississippi had risen and fallen like an ocean's tide and lightning bolts had sprung from the hot earth. Houston remembered how his little sister had declared the angels were about to come and lift her up into their dead father's arms. But it wasn't that. Even after a sentinel in a pecan tree pointed out the north-moving phenomenon, the army shivered in ignorance because all there was to see out there was a vast mobile blackness, like ink spilling off the page. The fact that it was a buffalo stampede eventually settled the men down.
But Houston knew better. This was a premonition. He'd been reading the western sky for days now, deciphering blood
in the patterns of black and green clouds. His dreams had been trying to tell him something, too.
A group of the officers, Houston included, mounted up to track the herd and bring in some buffalo. Hunting parties had been going out every now and then to supplement the beef Groce sold the army on credit. Today's excursion was partly meat-minded, but mostly just a frolic to escape from the squalor and tedium of camp life.
The pack of horsemen broke loose of the cedar and oak woods at about the time the sun cut a hole through the clouds, and all agreed the prairie was a beautiful sight. Poppies blazed red. Bluebonnets mixed with white sorghum. The grass was knee-high to a man in his saddle and the plains stretched lush and emerald under the sunbeams.
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sp; The buffalo path followed the line of least resistance along the earth's contours. Mile after mile the turf lay chopped and the grasses were pounded flat. As if following a roadway the hunters rode with a springtime abandon. A jug passed back and forth. The horsemen told stories and boasted and joked and made light of each other's guns or rig or horses. Houston kept to himself for the most part, unable to shake the feeling that something terrible had happened or was about to.
At last, just as Burleson wondered aloud if they'd accomplished the impossible by losing an entire buffalo herd, the hunters came upon their prey. The animals were grazing in a gigantic loop that stretched all the way around the hill. Men reined up to load or check their powder charges. Bets were placed on marksmanship. The jug made its final rounds. The group splintered into pairs and trios, fanning out to bracket the rear of the column.
Houston split left with Tom Rusk. Crossing behind a bluff, they lost sight of the herd. Five minutes later they came into the open upon a spit of high ground. Their vantage point hung within thirty yards of the closest buffalo.
"Close enough," Rusk murmured to Houston. The two men dismounted and Houston held their rifles upright while Rusk staked both horses to a rock. They crept up as far as possible, crouching in the tall grass. Then both stood up and, by whispered agreement, shot at the same animal.
Their buffalo was a black and tan female and she dropped onto her knees and slowly keeled over onto her side. The gun-
shots startled the herd around her, and maybe a hundred or two hundred animals rushed away. In no time their small stampede inspired a larger one. Houston saw Mosely Baker and Forbes and Sherman and others popping up from the grass to get off hasty shots. Three more buffalo fell, but one managed to get up and walk off before anyone could reload.
The grassy chute emptied of buffalo. Except for the earth trembling up through the long bones in his legs, Houston could have believed there'd never been a thousand buffalo spread before him just a minute earlier.