by Jeff Long
"Come on, Sam, let's claim our kill before one of those poor shots does," Rusk said. He was in a fine summery mood and Houston was glad to see him boyish for a change. Maybe Texas was good for forgetting.
They went back to their horses and rode down to the black and tan buffalo. Her black tongue was hanging in the dirt, but she was still breathing. Rusk took a pistol and shot her through the eye and her suffering was done.
Spread out over two hundred yards or so, the men grouped around their kills and drew knives. The butchering went on for a good part of the afternoon. It was bloody work, but the sunshine held and that put everyone in high spirits. They lay the cuts out on the pure green grass to let the meat cool before starting to load it on the pack animals. Houston forgot his earlier dread. The sun soaked in through his back, sweating him pleasantly.
When the sound came, no one paid any attention.
"Oh," it soughed.
Houston heard, but it wasn't much of a noise. It could have been a bird or a bit of stray breeze across the plains.
The second time it drifted through, their horses startled. Willie's strawberry mare took off across the prairie. This time men reached for their guns. Those who hadn't reloaded yanked butcher knives from the meat or dirt or their sheaths. In the confusion the sound came again.
"Oh," it shivered.
And there he was, standing in the grasses.
"Goddamn me," bellowed one of the frightened officers.
If not for the creature's standing upon two legs, Houston couldn't have told it was human, and even then his first thought was of the graveyard. Naked, every rib pronounced in the yel-
low sunbeams, his meat withered down to where each knee and elbow bulged like piney knots, the figure just stood there staring at the slaughtered meat lying on the grass.
"Oh," he said again. It was impossible to tell from his flesh that he was a white man, for he was painted with every color of mud and where skin showed through it had been seared by the sun or lacerated by thorns. His legs looked like a tailors pincushion with hundreds of cactus needles bristling out. His hair was straight, however, and it was bleached white by the elements. It was a white man all right.
"Don't shoot him," Houston yelled. "He's one of our own."
Ned Burleson sheathed his big shovel of a knife, out of temper for having no one to use it on. "You took some wrong track, mister," he growled.
The man was lost, in every sense lost, that was plain to see. Edging closer, Houston discovered the man was just a boy. The hollowed face barely showed sideburns and his lip was still fuzz. He looked fifteen at the oldest.
Houston set his teeth. The child's condition unnerved him. It wasn't that he'd never witnessed starvation and disease on the front edge of Anglo-Saxon settlement. To the contrary, he'd seen men and women worse than this, but those had been fugitive Negroes newly caught and whipped and manacled or slaves fresh in from Africa or the Caribbean. And there'd been that white girl bought back from the Comanches with her nose burnt off and just a hole in the middle of her face, a hideous sight.
What he'd never seen, though, were eyes like these. They were enormous and owllike and they saw, but didn't see. That's what scared Houston. To this ghost the men on horses surrounding him were just ghosts themselves. They were simply illusions. That seemed unbearable to Houston. It made the world a trick of the mind.
"Come here, son," he said.
The boy peered at Houston but didn't move.
"Tell us what happened," Houston said, and opened his arms and began to approach him.
"Talk, boy," Sherman demanded.
Nothing worked. Like something born out of the wind the prairie child trembled with each breeze, bending with the grasses. He had forgotten everything, even language itself.
"Where'd he come from?" Colonel Forbes wondered.
"Maybe the Comanches. Maybe he slipped the Coman-ches," someone ventured. "Maybe he just run away from home and here he is." Strange things happened out here. You never could tell. One thing was certain, the boy had suffered. He had a deep laceration along one shoulder and most of his fingernails were torn loose, probably from digging for food.
When he shied at riding a horse, they tied the frail creature with a rope to transport him back to camp. Lifting the poor child onto his own saddle, Houston was surprised because he weighed hardly more than a bagful of butterfly wings. Houston circled his arms around the boy. Like that they returned to camp, and before three minutes were gone the child had fallen asleep.
Soldiers were flocked at the neck of the ravine and lining the gully walls, eager to see what kind of meat the hunting party was bringing in. Coated with mud they blended in with the red clay and it looked like the earth itself were coming to life. The men were rambunctious and playful after their day of rare sunlight. But when they caught sight of the bound naked animal asleep against Houston's chest, the soldiers quit their whistling and mud throwing and grew still.
"What's that you catch, General?"
"Don't know, boys," Houston answered.
"You sure that ain't Indian?"
"He's white."
"By God."
"Somebody fetch Dr. Labadie," Houston said.
Houston took the boy directly to his tent. He wouldn't let anyone else carry the child. Inside Houston laid him on his blanket and untied the ropes. The boy went on sleeping.
"Let me through," Dr. Labadie told the soldiers gathered at the door of the tent. "Get out of my way."
The surgeon ducked into the tent, stovepipe first. "Jesus, look at this," he muttered, tipping the boy onto one side to look at his back. "It makes you wonder about God's love sometimes. What happened to him?"
"He hasn't said one word."
"He'll need those thorns out and some sewing. And I better open a vein," Dr. Labadie said. "I'll have my supper here, General. This will take some time."
Around sunset Deaf Smith brought in a second wanderer. Houston was standing by his tent, eating some of the buffalo. Squatting around their big mess fires, soldiers looked up with sparks dancing around their heads. The scout rode through the center of camp.
This one was a man dressed in rags and a loincloth and Smith was keeping him warm with his serape. This second discovery spooked them more than Houston's child, because as Smith rode through camp his passenger hooted at the army.
"Hoo, hoo," he sang to them. Nobody damned him because he was already cursed. Rangy soldiers quickly turned away, afraid of the evil eye.
Houston watched the procession for a minute, then whistled through his fingers and gave the scout a call. Smith steered his discovery toward the tent and lowered him to Houston and another soldier.
"I found this one southwest, clear over to Cedar Crick," Smith said with his high voice.
Inside by the light of a smoking tallow candle and with the aid of a pair of pliers, Doctor Labadie was pulling barbed thorns from the legs of Houston's prairie child. The doctor's long polished forehead showed the strain in beads of clear sweat. With each tug, he got a festered tab of flesh. The boy had awakened but seemed oblivious to the pain, staring at a gecko on the canvas ceiling.
Doctor Labadie glanced up from his bloody chore. He saw the cactus thorns jutting from the new man's legs and groaned. "If these were coon dogs, I'd say just shoot 'em. I'll be up all night pulling barbs. And they're like to end infected anyhow."
"Well, it's got to be done," Houston said.
The doctor scowled and bent back to the leg.
"Does he talk, or just do the hoot owl?" Houston asked Smith.
"He did speak on the ride, General. He had a rough go, one thing and another."
"What in heaven is going on out there?" Dr. Labadie wanted to know. "Have the Indians entered into this thing?"
Smith's expression said he knew, but there were soldiers bunched all around. He said, "I believe he's shy, General."
Houston acted. "You soldiers," he said, "clear out from here." When they were gone Smith revealed the answer.
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"We've been waiting for Fannin's army," he said. "Here they are."
Houston felt sick-Smith patted his wanderer on the shoulder. "This fellow talks crazy, but here is what I gather. Fannin burned his fort. He started to retreat like you told him, only too late. That one named Urrea hunted him down. There was a fight."
"These are survivors of the battle?" Dr. Labadie asked.
The scout shook his head no. "Fannin's bunch ended up surrendering. They got marched back to Goliad. For a week they were held prisoner. Then the Mexicans took them out and shot and bayoneted them. This one, he run, then he swum a crick, then he run some more."
"Fannin's army is dead?" It was unthinkable. Houston needed those men.
Smith nodded his wild red head. "On Palm Sunday the Mexicans formed them into groups. They started each group off in different directions. The men figured they were getting paroled and getting marched off to home. So they sung the Yankee Doodle and 'Home Sweet Home,' that kind of thing. Then it started."
"But there were almost five hundred of them," Houston said.
"There were," Smith said.
The survivor sat in the dirt hooting gently. He lay back.
Houston stood over him. His head felt ready to split open. First the Alamo, now this. He tried to imagine what the news of disaster would do to his army. He wondered what it would do to him.
Since learning the details, Houston had not been particularly shocked that Bowie and Travis and Crockett and the others had died at the Alamo. Most of them had gone down in the heat of battle. But this violated the rules of warfare. What had happened to Fannin's men violated logic. Worst of all, it violated Houston's imagination. He simply could not fathom crafting a mass execution. That was the part that fascinated and repelled him the most. What sort of imagination could piece together such evil?
Above all the loss of Fannin's men gutted Houston's plans. In a coded letter to Jackson he had projected an army two thousand strong. Such an army, he'd promised, could savage
the Mexicans guerrilla-style in the woods and bayous of eastern Texas. They wouldn't whip the Mexican army, but they would fight long and hard enough to convince the world—or Congress, at least—of their sovereignty. American intervention, in the form of U.S. regulars, would finish it. But now, with less than seven hundred ragamuffins, Houston had lost the ability even to create a fiction. They had been reduced to what they were, an ambition.
Over the next three days Deaf Smith and several of Seguin's vaqueros brought in five more survivors. Some bore saber wounds or bullet holes. All had starved on their solitary journeys. They entered camp shimmering with the strange translu-cence of desert monks. Their eyes were huge from starvation and too much sheer faith.
Each time, the army stilled and watched, every soldier looking for himself in these wracked transcendent survivors. Their bravado melted. Houston noticed that the soldiers had quit their horseplay and fistfights. Everyone who had faced Santa Anna's army this winter was now dead and burned. Only a handful of men had survived the Mexican army's great wrath.
Houston kept Fannin's men in his tent. He watched over them, making sure they were fed and given water and kept warm and dry. He provided them with blankets, including his own, and called Dr. Labadie back anytime one of the survivors seemed not to be getting better. They had terrible nightmares and Houston comforted them, telling stories or listening to their horrifying tales.
Their worst dreams tended to be about fields of tall undulating prairie grass. One way or another, these seven had flung themselves deep into the land. They had become the land, the land had become them, an agonizing mystical act of communion. Separated from one another after the massacre, each had thought himself the sole survivor, at least until they began coming across traces of one another: a signature scrawled in charcoal upon a plank of wood; footprints; once, a distant sighting of a running nude.
They had wandered, lost. They had tried to imagine the map of Texas, but couldn't. Some had walked in circles. Others had taken their bearings where they could think them up, off a patch of tree moss, from the sun, from a flock of geese heading north. And now they have me, thought Houston.
So far as the seven survivors were concerned, they had been delivered from the wilderness by the hand of Sam Houston. Their gratitude was simple. It came in bashful thank-ye's which Houston deflected with his own thanks for their sacrifices. Over and over it came in their eyes every time he entered his crowded tent.
Remarkably, as the survivors recovered, so did Houston. Hour by hour, ounce by ounce, his despair fell away. These skeletal survivors had been delivered to him from the desert. That's how he felt. They had come to lead him back to his army, to lead them all out of this filthy dead-end ravine.
The boy he'd found on the buffalo hunt began to recuperate, at least physically. He could sit up and drink broth and down johnnycakes and chew meat and his eyes cleared of their awful blankness. One morning he woke up and could speak. He said, "morning." But there was a limit to his speech. He couldn't remember anything about himself, not even his name. He seemed to feel guilty about that, as if he were betraying someone.
Houston carved a stick into a hopping frog and gave it to the boy. From then on, men called the nameless boy Tad for tadpole. It gave people a way to identify him, but did nothing to satisfy his longing. "Maybe I'm just dead," he told one of the other survivors who passed it along to Houston.
One afternoon Houston returned to his tent to hear another boy teaching Tad an old colonial arithmetic riddle. "If twenty dogs for thirty groats go forty weeks to grass, how many hounds for sixty crowns may winter in that place?"
It was the double rule of three; Houston had taught it to schoolchildren himself. He rounded the corner and there was a lank young soldier sitting beside Tad with numbers scrawled in the dirt between their feet. One hand was wrapped with rags, and the tips of his fingers were swollen.
"Howdy do, gentlemen," Houston said. "Mind if I sit with you?"
"He's the general," Tad told the new boy.
"I know that," the boy said matter-of-factly. He had a self-possession beyond his years.
"Then you're one up on me," Houston said in a friendly manner.
"Terrell Mott," the boy briskly clarified, practically indifferent to his own name. He didn't give his rank. What else would a teenager be but a private?
Houston took a seat against the log. He stretched his legs, scratched at the lice on his hairy neck. "You two soldiers know each other, do you?"
Tad nodded a hungry yes, but that was just his desire for a friend. Private Mott admitted, "Nope, first time."
"How'd you crush that hand?"
"My horse. It fell on me."
"It doesn't look right to me," Houston said.
"She's crooked all right."
"Maybe you ought to show it to a doctor."
"I did." The boy shrugged. "They said too late. She's set funny. That's that."
Houston liked this boy. There were parts of himself in Private Mott's stoicism. Not much differently, Houston had belittled his own gaping wound in front of General Jackson and then had gone on to fight and take more wounds. It made Houston wonder how many times history might repeat the same story and with what layering of similar details.
"Which outfit has you?" he asked.
"Colonel Neill's cannon. Except there ain't no cannon."
"Not yet," Houston conceded.
"Not ever," Mott bluntly responded. "Some fool had us drown the ones we had. I don't expect we'll see more growing on trees."
Houston didn't point out that it was he who had ordered the artillery dismantled and sunk in the river back in Gonzales for the sake of speeding their retreat. Now he wished they'd hung on to at least one of the tubes.
"Well it's good to see the artillery fraternizing with . . ." Houston hesitated, not knowing what to call Fannin's survivors, "with the rest of us."
"I had some free time. I came over here."
"I wasn't aware we had a ma
th scholar in the army." Houston pointed at the equations drawn in the dirt.
Private Mott ducked his head, mistaking Houston's tease for a criticism. "We were just talking."
"Terrell was at the Alamo," Tad volunteered.
Houston waited for Private Mott to backtrack on his extravagance. The Alamo was fast developing into a nativity of choice. Men who'd never been within a hundred miles of San Antonio could be heard describing with great authority the limestone walls and Colonel Crockett's gigantic arms, and they had invented a host of reasons to justify their last-minute absence at the battle.
But the private didn't retract his claim, which left Houston the choice of treating the boy as a liar or accepting his word. He decided to take Mott at face value. Maybe in fact the Alamo had something to do with his injured hand. If it did, Private Mott didn't elaborate on it except to say, "I got sent out and the others died. And my whole point is, it made me an orphan of a certain kind."
Houston poked a stick at the dirt and maintained his show of unoccupied leisure. But inside he felt jolted. This man-child with his peach fuzz and pimples and gangly arms, this muddy wisp of a private, had arrived at some sort of wisdom. Houston paid attention even while appearing, carefully, to only half-listen.
"Orphans," he prompted.
"Maybe you lose your family, lose your home. Maybe you lose your name, even," Mott expanded. "But in a way, I figure you're better off with none of that, you know."
"How's that," Houston asked, a trifle more earnestly than he'd meant to reveal.
Mott answered with sureness. "A baby doesn't remember where it came from, out of the sky, up from a vegetable patch, what not. But every day now, I wake up and I know right where I came from."
"That's it," Tad said. As if the clouds had opened up and he'd just caught sight of a distant city, the boy closed his eyes and held it inside.
Right then something took seed in Houston's heart. As surely as these boys had lost their pasts, Houston now began to feel himself found. These children had witnessed the apocalypse, but turned it around and made it into a beginning. Having risen up from the dead, they had no time for feeling sorry for themselves, not with so much else to do, a whole future to elect. Houston had listened to and generated enough revolutionary cant to lift a French balloon. He had signed with flourish