by Jeff Long
a declaration of independence and corralled an army of long rifles for a clash. But none of that counted against what he'd just witnessed. Because it was these two boys who had just cast the first real vote for Texas, and it lay scratched in the dirt, a riddle.
Chapter Seven
Houston led his army up and out from the ravine into the scarlet dawn. Except for Deaf Smith and a few of the scouts, they had yet to sight a single enemy soldier. But Santa Anna's army loomed gigantically, like a bad season, like famine or the plague, all-consuming. Ever since Fannin's survivors had surfaced upon the prairie, bobbing among the grasses like shipwreck victims, Houston had watched his soldiers sober. He didn't regret that one bit.
To Houston's relief his soldiers had finally begun to lose confidence in their abilities with a long rifle and a butcher knife. They quit talking about themselves as legends waiting to happen and no longer spoke of Santa Anna as a bug to be stepped on. The hard truth was sinking in. They might be the children of the first Adam, but they weren't ten feet tall and the enemy was not some treed squirrel open to the shot.
Old Man Groce had sold Houston a splendid horse on credit, and at last he felt mounted like a general ought to be. Both knees were peeking through rips in his tobacco-green pants and the frock coat was falling to pieces on his back, but he didn't mind now, not seated atop this mild-white masterpiece. Saracen was the stallion's name, and he was thirty-four hands high with vast bellows for lungs and muscles that bunched and rippled under the saddle.
Houston stayed out in front of his army. Saracen's frisky spirits made a convenient excuse. In truth Houston was trying
to keep ahead of his own doubts. At some point they needed to branch north or branch south. If the goal was Nacogdoches and a feint to pull General Gaines's 6th Regiment across the Sabine River, they had to go north. If Houston meant to turn and fight, he had to go south. Either way risked Texas. By going north they would likely trigger a war between Mexico and the United States, a war that might very well ally Britain and France with Mexico and possibly stunt American expansion on the continent. And by going south they would isolate themselves and face almost certain decimation.
To this point, Houston's cryptic pleas to Gaines produced small results. Beyond allowing the more zealous soldiers—fully uniformed and bearing new Type III U.S. muskets—to "desert" from his army and join Houston's bunch, the old fox was playing the same nervewracking waiting game Houston was. The irony didn't escape Houston: Even as he battled desertion, he was now in the position of welcoming deserters. They were better than nothing, though not much.
When the first of Gaines's deserters had showed up at the Brazos ravine, Houston had imagined the presence of regulars would put some snap in his rabble. With their sky-blue coatees and trousers and eelskin forage caps and squared knapsacks and wooden canteens, the regulars had made an impressive contrast to Houston's tribal bunch slathered with ravine mud. In fact for a matter of two or three days, the regulars had followed orders and kept their area neat and they'd made model soldiers.
But the tug of chaos had proved too much. Gaines's men were almost indistinguishable from his own now. They had bartered off bits and pieces of their uniforms and kits and the result was a hybrid of buckskin and regulation blues and bare feet. It came as no surprise to see their obedience erode and their crisp elan melt to mud. They seemed doomed, all of them, imprisoned with their worst instincts in a cage of their own making.
Unable to decide on the north or south route, Houston kept the army pushed in between, due east, putting off the choice and maddening his officers who saw no strategy, no method, only a slow and shameful drift. What they didn't see was how, when he walked among the soldiers at night and saw
them sleeping like dead men on the coming battlefield, Houston agonized over how to keep them safe long enough to make them dangerous.
Five days after leaving the ravine they entered snow, or so it seemed. For hundreds of yards at a stretch, white feathers carpeted the path. "Taking the Sabine chute," it was called, heading for the river dividing Mexico from the United States. These were the remains of mattresses emptied to lighten the refugees' load, here a batch of goose feathers, thirty yards later a splash of stiff pins plucked from chicken breasts and backs, a poor family's bed. They passed furniture tossed into the brush, a set of sky-blue British china lovingly stacked upon a rock, and a dead mule.
A mile later they came upon a dying cow trapped to the neck in a sink of mud. For no reason Houston could see, good or bad, Three-Legged Willie climbed down off his horse and unfurled a bullwhip. Chastising the poor lowing beast with jokes that no one understood, he proceeded to lash it across the face until both eyes ruptured, and even that didn't complete his odd sport. Dumbfounded, Houston was about to draw his pistol, but Deaf Smith shot the animal first with his rifle, then rode on.
Around noon Houston and his soldiers caught up with the refugees. There were several hundred desperate women and children and slaves jammed at a swollen stream. It was raining again. As Houston approached on his stallion, the women set to shouting and wailing for deliverance. He pulled his vest shut—all the buttons had fallen off by now—and steered Saracen into the thick of them.
"Sam Houston," a woman cried out.
The crowd parted for him. Except for a few grandpas with stained white billy-goat beards, the only men in the group were black slaves who drove the wagons and herded the livestock and carried children, white and black, on their shoulders. Some carried hunting rifles and were obviously filling in for their absent masters. The refugees looked little different from the soldiers—emaciated and ragged with wet coughs and pinkeye and shaking with malaria.
"Thank Jesus, we are saved," shouted a skinny woman with her wet dress plastered to her collarbones and pelvis.
In an attempt at rising to the occasion, Houston swept his three-cornered hat in a long-armed presidential arc that
embraced them all, but against the misery spread on every side the gesture seemed to him pinched and empty. The smell of sweat evinced how these women and children had fought the wilderness every bit as hard as his soldiers had. What distinguished them from his army was the smell of menstrual blood. It was a raw, fertile, bonding smell and Houston leaned into it like a prisoner catching sight of a butterfly. He hadn't realized how much he missed the presence of women.
"O my strength, haste thee to help me," another woman called up to Houston. "Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion's mouth."
The voices surged. Save for the woman who kept on with her Psalms, Houston heard little of their clamor very distinctly. The women were instruments and their tragedy was music, pure and simple. Their song lifted over the water's loud rush. Mosely Baker arrived and behind him, on a horse sprayed with vomit, John Wharton came in hunched with flu.
"They shall come," the Psalms woman feverishly praised. "They shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born."
Out of the corner of one eye, Houston saw the two colonels shaking their heads in disbelief. It did indeed sound as if the woman was praying directly to him.
"Mosely?" a female voice reached up from the pandemonium. "Mosely, my God, you've come." The sea of hooded faces and white eyes shifted. A spark flashed red in the dark crush of humanity. Part of Houston's heart flew out to the girl, and he wished it were him she was calling. Until then he hadn't known how much he remembered of her: her name, her green eyes, her ferocious pledge to love.
Molly had found her soldier, or him her, or them each other. But whichever way it was, Mosely wasn't prepared. The colonel jerked at the sound of his name. Under the sunburn and whiskers his face blanched. Houston frowned, disappointed by the young man's repulsion. Pretending not to hear, Mosely hauled his horse's neck around and pushed his way back through the crowd, away from her.
Houston rode deeper into the thick crowd, here and there intercepted by faces from another lifetime, half-forgotten images of pe
ople who'd once lived in places like Gonzales and San
Felipe and Victoria and Montezuma and Egypt and squatter settlements scattered anywhere like corn seeds thrown carelessly between tree trunks. In a way, though, all of them were strangers to his eye, even the ones he knew, because their defeat and vulnerability looked so alien. They reminded him of the Cherokee people as, year by year, Old Hickory cast them west and further west, out from their gardens, their hopes.
"Why are you massed here?" he asked a hollowed-out woman with buckteeth. She was standing stock-still beside a wagon full of shivering children. "Why is no one crossing?"
She walked over to him, obedient to some idea. Without a word she handed up a bundle wrapped in rags. Houston thought she was presenting him with a gift of food, a ham, say, or a rabbit.
"Madam," he started to thank her. Then he flipped open the rags. Inside the bundle he discovered an infant, cold and blue and with dead eyes staring at him. Houston grunted. He fumbled and nearly dropped the tiny corpse, and came close to cursing the woman, too. But her eyes were almost as dead as the child's.
"Colonel Wharton," Houston shouted back down the line. After a minute Wharton shoved his way through the crowd.
"Take a detail," Houston instructed him. "Bury this poor babe. And see to any other burying that needs to get done." Thinking quickly, he added, "And fire a salute to the dead."
"What in hell . . ."
"These people, they are heroes." Houston spoke loudly so the refugees could hear him. "Heroes." He lost nothing except a little gunpowder to try and raise the refugees' desolate mood. They needed something. They were so spiritless it would be a wonder if they reached the morning, much less their ancestral soil. Louisiana had never seemed so far away.
As his soldiers started to arrive, Houston felt shock running through his army. From infancy these people had believed themselves to be the sons and daughters of giants. But the truth of it was, underneath their sinew and buckskins and gingham and raw knuckles and broken nails, they were just scratching for a place in the wilderness. They called themselves Christians, but even with their Jesus talk, they were really just pagans worshiping the sun, following it west, ever west. And now, like rats in a flood, they were swimming east, out from the rising
currents of Mexican sovereignty. It went contrary to everything they had ever known about themselves.
Houston nudged his stallion on to the stream. The refugees would not cross because of the water. There was a bridge, but it lay submerged beneath a foot of rapid water. The bleached-out wood of the passageway was visible through the water, a ghost of a thing. Understandably none of the horses or cattle would cross on it.
"We already lost one to it," a woman with a soggy hat told him. She was sitting under a wagon, the first in line to cross if a crossing ever happened. "I had our nigger swim the stock across. He walked the bridge. But he fell and the gators shagged him, and my cattle, too. Everything except my pony. That was yesterday."
Houston saw the pony waiting patiently for them on the opposite shore, a lonely sight. "No one wants to try no more," the wagon woman said. Houston didn't blame them. The way it sank off into the gloom and far bayou, the bridge looked like a sure walk into the underworld.
So for a day and a night they had sat here piled against the river, waiting for the Mexicans to find them or the waters to wash them out to sea or to get raised up by the rapture, Houston couldn't say what. But clearly they weren't going to move unless they were led across the water.
"Now you'll see, the general will watch over us," a mother told her little girl.
Houston forced himself to be stone deaf to them all. "Keep those soldiers moving," he bellowed back at his officers. And to the populace he shouted, "Let those soldiers come. Clear a way."
This stream needed to be crossed, and quickly. Littered with women and children, the place guaranteed a bloodbath if the Mexican army happened to show up. The civilians would get caught in crossfire, the river would turn red. He had to lead them to safety.
"Your reata there," Houston said, pointing at a coil of braided rope in the back of her wagon, "it will make a good hand line, once I fix it on the other side." He stretched out of the saddle and hefted it, a long rope made of good heifer skin.
"Don't you lose that," the wagon woman said. "I've already lost enough things to this goddamn river."
"I'll do my best," Houston said, and fitted the coil over one shoulder. Then he turned Saracen toward the underwater bridge and gave him the spur. Through the great white neck and quivering flanks, he could feel the animal resisting him. Houston bullied the horse, digging the spur in hard and at the same time reining him tight.
But the horse balked. For the first time since obtaining the monster, Houston regretted its size and power and even its beautiful white color. Atop this Alexandrian stallion, he towered over everyone else in the army. While such a height would hold his triumphs that much closer to the sky and sunlight, it would also make his failures that much more conspicuous. Goddamn my conceits, he confessed to himself. Goddamn this animal.
Saracen trembled between his legs. Houston wanted to lose his temper and flail the creature with his scabbard. He wanted to force it to grandly prance across the bridge. What a vision that would be, General Houston walking up the water. But the horse didn't share his fascination with magnificent illusions. It refused the bridge.
Houston got down off the horse. Wharton and Sherman and some of the other officers guffawed to one another. It had happened, Houston's fall from grace, and without a tumble, but a meek dismount. He turned his back to them.
Softly, with nonsense words a man would only murmur to a horse or a dog, Houston gentled Saracen. Finally, when the stallion wouldn't stop its quivering, Houston dropped the reins, just let them go. He reached into his pocket and found a lead ball. Unseen, he slipped it into his mouth and bit down, the way Old Hickory had once told him. The duelo had been like this: everything to lose, everything to gain. Houston took the step. Holding high his saddlebag with the books and his pair of pistols, he entered the water.
The officers quit their laughter. The people watched him in their hundreds. He could feel every eye upon him. Oddly, for the leader of a retreat, retreat was out of the question. He could not go anywhere but forward.
Step by step Houston sloshed through the shin-high rapids. The bridge was solid enough, but it was slippery. The water cut white around his legs. It tugged at him, disputing his right to pass. A dark green ripple slid against his boot, serpentine,
poisoning his mind with fear. The serpent turned to water. It was nothing.
But Houston had made the mistake. He had looked down. Immediately the water was there, mesmerizing and alluring. He could see the bridge beneath the opaque surface. He could feel it under his boots. But looking at it only made him dizzy. Suddenly he couldn't be certain the bridge was really there.
Houston bit down on the musket ball and forced himself to raise his eyes up. The best thing, the only thing, was to keep fixed on the opposite bank. That helped. It came naturally to him to pay attention to what was out of reach. After the halfway point, the crossing turned easier. The river turned to shallows.
Remarkably Saracen followed right behind him. Houston didn't know the stallion was there until he reached the far shore and turned around. He thought that a fine lesson in independence: Give a people their freedom and they would come along on their own. But then Saracen shouldered him aside and promptly mounted the shaggy pony, which was a mare and in season. Houston liked that even more. Maybe love turned their destinies after all.
He tied a rock to one end of the rope and cast it back across and got a hand line started. After that, the army and the refugees came over the bridge. The crossing took all day long, exhausting the already weakened civilians. For their sake, Houston made camp a half mile from the river. He issued instructions for the refugees to stay with the army for the night.
Even before nightfall it was obvious the combined people
meant to throw a feast and frolic. Houston didn't try to stop them, he just posted a rear guard to guard the bridge against Mexicans, and found a spot to pitch his tent removed from the hurly-burly.
The rain quit. The moon rose. The clouds dispersed and a muggy spring heat wrapped the camp. Mosquitoes swarmed up from the swampy earth, and crickets began sawing away in the forest. Gently at first, as if tiptoeing, another sound began to drown out the bug song. It was the sound of dancing and drinking and fighting and loving.
At about ten o'clock Tom Rusk came around the hill and put his head inside the tent. Houston had a little candle going
and was reading. "You ought to come to dinner," Rusk said. "There's a lady's requesting your presence. A lady of honor."
"What lady?" Houston wasn't exactly tired, but he wasn't in any mood for fighting with his colonels tonight. The more he kept himself cloistered and remote, the lighter his burden.
"Just come to supper, Sam," Rusk said. "She wants to meet the general of the army. It can't hurt."
Houston groused about the hour, but that was pretense, the sort of thing old men do when they haven't been remembered properly. In fact he'd been lying here curious all evening. It sounded like a whole town's New Year celebration on the other side of the hill. And the prospect of meeting a woman who wanted to meet him made a visit down irresistible. He combed his hair with some precision and knocked the dust off his seat and descended into camp.