by Jeff Long
Houston recognized the passage with a start. It was from his cherished Iliad. Before he could expose the theft, though, Lamar admitted his borrowing. "It's not my poem, of course," he said. "But we can make it ours if we want. It can guide us if we have the will." He could have been talking about the weather, it was said so mildly.
Houston took a deep breath. So, they meant to twist the lion's tail, to raise up their discontent once again, but this time with the women present to witness it. There was another difference. Tonight the colonels had chosen a private to lead their assault. Old Hickory would have shot the man dead for it, and then shot a second man just to make sure his barrel was clean.
"We must have no more of your runaway, Houston," Wharton started off. "It is time for revenge, goddamn it. Time for destruction."
"We must stand here," Sherman threw in.
"Split the army," Wharton demanded, "half goes north, half south, then catch the enemy. . . ."
"No, no," Three-Legged Willie howled.
Houston saw Rusk and Dr. Patrick exchange a startled glance. They were new to the mutiny talk. So was Mrs. Mann, but it shocked her less. In fact the army's fractures seemed to excite her. Her eyes flashed. She was like pure fire, feeding upon their passion, not their words. Houston pressed his hands against the table and shoved to his feet.
"I look around," he rumbled, "and I wonder to myself. . . at this very moment, while we sit here and our enemy sits out yonder ... I wonder, Houston, right now, right at this very minute, what do you think Mr. Santa Anna is looking at in his own camp? A table full of good right officers? Men who are ever patient and never tiring in their patriotism and zeal for the cause of defense? Men who bear every incident of the soldier without complaint? Men who are the cream of his army? Men who desire the good?"
He swept the table with a wolfish grin. His officers had fallen silent. All around them the camp was in a state of bedlam. People were howling and gobbling to the starry night sky, imitating hounds or turkeys or spring bears or whatever their favorite animals were. A pack of brawling men collapsed a corner of the bonfire, plunging much of their light into the black pond water. What light was left came from the few torches which hadn't been drafted for use as cudgels. Even those seemed close to blinking into darkness, extinguished by the sheer bulk of their noise.
But at the table the officers' silence shaped a bubble and Houston was its center. He raced to invent his own meaning. He placed his hands flat on the table, bracketing the bones of his meal.
"I wonder to myself, Houston, if Mr. Santa Anna looked around his supper table right now and considered his officers, would he see a round table of buckskinned knights? Would he see in their eyes the spark of God?" Houston dropped his voice a pitch.
"I ask that," he said. "And then I say to myself no, of course not." He grinned at them with a ferocity that was also utter helplessness. They were off balance. So was he. It was a precarious moment.
"No," he mocked them, "of course not. And do you know how I know?" He traveled from eye to eye, from one man's glare to the next man's scowl.
"Because I know that old Santa Anna must be surrounded by wicked men who plot against him every minute. He probably can't sleep at night because he fears his own officers. When I try to imagine him, I see a man who's blown along by whispers. He has to listen to the whispers and go where they say go, otherwise he'll get stabbed in the back and replaced by the next brute. And whenever I think about the coup d'etat waiting in Santa Anna's ranks, I say to myself, God, Houston, how lucky you are to have such true and righteous colonels." He lifted his glass. It was, by chance, empty. "Here's to loyalty, gentlemen. Here's to you."
They sat there, stilled by the admonition. Houston's insolence—the rawness of it—stunned them. Not only that, he had spanked them in front of ladies. No one spoke. Teeth gritted, Burleson was beet red with the memory of his own mutinous troops last fall. Lamar looked wonderfully flatfooted.
At last Sherman came to life. "Outrageous," he protested. "To make us into those rascals in Mexico."
"But you forget," Houston reminded him. "You are in Mexico."
"And so we are all little Napoleons, is that it?"
"Oh, not so large as little, sir," Houston retorted, and he looked straight at Private Lamar.
"Goddamn it," Sherman bellowed, like a man who'd stubbed his toe.
Houston twisted and carefully spit tobacco juice into the mud beside his chair.
"What of you, General?" Lamar piped up. "We find ourselves painted with dark strokes. What portrait do you paint for yourself? A George Washington for our Texas maybe? Or, maybe just a King Andy." He delivered an academic smile.
"Me?" Houston said softly. He looked around, then fastened upon Mrs. Mann. She had caught her lower lip with
strong white teeth. There was his same abandon in her eyes. "Why," he drawled, "I'm just an old moke."
They looked affronted, not knowing what he was talking about. The men who'd been in Texas long enough to understand some Spanish were either too drunk or too slow to see his meaning. The newcomers thought he was playing a trick.
"If you can't speak English, don't speak, Houston," Sherman snapped.
Now Tom Rusk got in on it. He was properly solemn. "Old mokes," he explained, "they are desperate, vicious beasts. Exiles. That's what the Mexicans call old mustang stallions that get driven from their fold by a youngster. And ever after, the mokes wander wild, searching for another herd to dominate. Every now and then you'll see one off there on the prairie, all alone. But every now and then they find a herd, and break it to their rule."
Against the roar of brawling men and the silence of these conspirators, Mrs. Mann's laughter rang like bell music.
Chapter Eight
Houston might have gone looking for her, but the night was too abundant out there. Human musk hung in the air and a million fireflies bobbed in constellations of their own making. It kept him in his tent, propped on one elbow, watching the fiery silhouettes writhe and blend upon his canvas wall, remembering his Plato about shadows and reality. Sleep was an impossibility. Finally he got up to do some work.
With a twist of tobacco to one side of his ink bottle, a strip of scorched beef to the other, Houston sat crosslegged in the dirt and composed another of his anonymous pleas to General Gaines to cross from Louisiana and invade Mexico. This one revolved around fictitious Indian attacks on refugees. Other reports had plagiarized from his army's worst fantasies: Mexican rape, the burning alive of Bowie, the enslavement of white prisoners. His wax taper smoked furiously. Houston wrote with his left hand to disguise his handwriting, but he knew Gaines would see right through it. The theme was too familiar: Please, Lord, come save us from ourselves.
When she entered there was no announcement, no request. The tent flap jerked open, his little flame guttered and almost flushed out. The inky smoke stung his eyes. "Sam Houston," she said and planted her bare feet, wide and splayed, beside his letter.
Mrs. Mann had mud to her knees and her blue calico dress was soaked with sweat and raindrops knocked off trees and bushes along the way. Houston smelled human milk.
He saw the stains on her bodice and wondered where her baby was.
"You move so quiet," he told her.
She was looking all around the spartan tent, not that there was much to see, just his satchels and a new saddle blanket and a round stone he'd brought in to make a pillow.
"I don't have anything to drink," Houston apologized.
"A bit of that twist will do," she said. Houston handed the tobacco up, and she returned it a few inches shorter. Her eyes were shining. He wondered how this would go next, if it would start with a kiss or just be a straight-out rutting. It had been years since he'd used the Cherokee prayer for winning a woman: Oh Black Spider, may you hold her soul in your web. He longed for a kiss, for a soul in his web. But practically speaking, he wasn't about to pass up a chance for some raw congress for the sake of a mere romantic longing.
After a min
ute Mrs. Mann said, "You have my oxen."
Houston wasn't sure he'd heard right. "Madam?"
"One of your captains came and took my oxen. For your cannon."
So that was it. Disappointment dropped on him like a weight. They had obtained two brand new brass cannon—a donation from the city of Cincinnati—yesterday morning. Colonel Neill had sent his captain around to requisition oxen to haul the artillery. And Mrs. Mann was here to complain.
"I just about shot him to shreds," she went on. "He said the army of Texas was confiscating. I told him to go to hell. I'm not about to lose my oxen to a goddamn war."
"But we have them now?" Houston sighed.
She spit toward the corner of the tent and nodded. "I made it a loan. I told him, you all can use my team provided you're going to Luziane. Go to war, though, I take 'em back. He said, go tell it on Sam Houston. So what is it?"
Houston's eye wandered up her contours. There was all of womanhood in the span between his pristine belle and this bonny amazon. "Mrs. Mann," he said, "every war has its secrets."
"I'm no spy."
"But with all due respect."
"I don't think you know," she said. "That's what the people say. You don't know your own mind." She eyeballed him.
He let it lie. Mosquitoes whined in the heat. A woman
groaned somewhere close bv. A man whispered encouragement.
Heart sinking, or sunk. Houston took his own measure. He tried picturing what Mrs. Mann saw at that moment, a balding man sweating on the dirt with some papers of state and a candle. A pretender. He made a motion to get up and see her out. but he felt too drained. He'd once commissioned a painter to render him as a Roman emperor standing among ruins. That was how he felt just now. like a man in ruin.
But then Mrs. Mann came down from her great height above him. She squatted on her heels and rested her forearms on her knees. "You know."' she told him. "Jean Lahtte had me for supper once."
Houston blinked at the exotic suddenness of it. He couldn't think of anvthing to replv except. "Lafitte's dead."
"Oh he was alive, sir." She grinned. "I can testify to that." It appeared as a big saucv parting of chapped lips. Her teeth were crooked and so was the smile, but Mrs. Mann was enchanting him.
"It was out on Galveston Island." she said. "I was a young thing. And he was the laird of a kingdom. It was onlv one night. One supper. He was a grand man and a grand talker, too. He went on and on about how somedav Texas would belong to him and he would be its emperor."
"Lafitter" Houston snorted. It had never occurred to him the French privateer might have had designs on anvthing more than his island keep. On second thought it made perfect sense that a pirate would fasten on Texas.
"Oh ves. And he had things there from all over the world. Wine and brandv and Spanish lace." she remembered. "And hard sweets from London and cups from China. In the morning. Mr. Lahtte told me. Look through the bootv and pick something, anvthing. and it's vours. So I did."
"A generous man." Houston said. Some of his spirit was returning to him. Unless he was mistaken, she was weaving a web of her own.
She nodded. "Mightv. He also gave me a child." She seemed to enjov Houston's surprise. "That was mv first. She's mostlv grown now."
A smile dawned on Houston's face. He was delighted, ut-terlv taken. What this armv—indeed, this whole countrvside—
needed was more women, both like and unlike Mrs. Mann. Without women thev would end up like Stephen Austin and so manv other bachelor colonists in this region, wizened and shrunken like old grasshoppers, shacked up with similar men struck blind bv their vision of land and more land, infinite land. Bur love for the land was not love, it was religion. More than once on this journev Houston had heard his soldiers feeling for one another, eves closed, shaping themselves into Greek warriors for lack of a woman. Thev were—all of them—in search of her. And here she was with a crooked smile on her face and a fertile womb.
"You are a rare spirit, maam," Houston said.
"It's a rare night," she said.
It struck him that with all her talk about a love child from her bvgone pirate chief, perhaps she'd come simply to get a siring. It wouldn't be the first time Houston had been approached bv women hunting for seed thev judged noble just because it had 'governor" or "congressman" attached to it. Not that he objected. Since he didn't believe in God—not the bearded biblical character, anvhow—he didn't have hellfire to fret over. That left onlv one other danger, the risk of believing in his own greatness just because someone else did.
With one liquid motion—businesslike, as if skinning a colorful animal, a pheasant, sav—Mrs. Mann slipped her blue dress up and over her head. The sight of so much nakedness so suddenlv left Houston hoarse. "Oh God." he whispered, and felt singularlv unsteadv for a great general. Still chewing, she smiled her crooked smile and let him look all he wanted.
Finallv she said. "I didn't figure you to be such a shy man."
Houston took his turn and shucked his shirt, and she wet her lips seeing his big chest. Then, in the midst of fumbling with his pants, he knocked the candle over and plunged them into darkness. It was intentional. Bevond a point he was shy. Showing the battle and surgerv scars crossing his arms and shoulder was one thing. But he'd learned the hard way to conceal the wound. It embarrassed him still that he and Eliza had never consummated their marriage, though at least he'd had the honor of returning her to her father as whole as she'd come to him.
Mrs. Mann reached between his legs and took him in both hands. It was a matter of a minute before she came across the
arrow hole leaking into the thicket of loin hair. Her fingers recoiled. That always happened, and things often stopped right here. But then she went on exploring.
"Does this hurt you?" she whispered, touching the wound lightly.
"Sometimes, yes," Houston said.
"Then we need to be careful." The way she kissed him next, he wished for the candlelight. He wanted to see her eyes and hair and lips. But their urgency flooded them. All they could do was hold on to each other for all it was worth.
Afterward she sat with Houston's enormous head and shoulders cradled in her lap, stroking his hair. Off in the distance one of the refugees was singing all alone in the night. It was a woman's song, beautiful and keen, carried from the old country. She sang it in the Gaelic, the song of Scottish exile.
"Thug thu uamgach ni bh'agam, Ann an cogadh adaobhar, Cha chrodh is cha chairdean. ..." On and on she sang to them, like a ghost, like a bird. From his mother and grandmother, Houston knew the meaning, if not, exactly, the words.
"You took from me everything I had, in the war on your behalf/ I am not mourning cattle and sheep, but my partner/ Since I am left alone with nothing but my shroud!"
They are burying us already, Houston thought, drifting near sleep. Could we be ready at last? He wasn't the only one listening to the shroud song.
"Folks say you'll take the army right when we go left tomorrow," Mrs. Mann said. "They say you'll go wait for Santy Any in the bayous."
Houston didn't answer. Sunrise wasn't far off, and with it the daily strife. But her breasts were soft and warm against his neck and he felt at peace in her arms, ready to sleep for a century.
"Folks say you'll fight a great battle."
"I'm much obliged to all those folks," Houston murmured.
"Even if they're right," she said, "I think they're wrong. I think you ought not go wait for Santy Any. You ought not
fight.-
That pricked Houston a little more awake. He had an army ready to kill him for not leading them into a fight to the death, and here was this woman ready to love him if he would quit
Texas altogether. How could that be? What did they want of him? "What ought I do, then?"
"Maybe Texas don't want us," she suggested. "Maybe this ain't home."
"Maybe not yet," Houston qualified it.
"Maybe not ever. I mean, what if. What if we just called it quits and said, Home's where
we left it at, over on the other side."
"No more frontier?" said Houston. No sooner did he say it, than the thought made him a little sick, as if someone were locking a door with him on the inside.
"What if we decided to just take care of our children and tend our crops and say Texas never belonged to us anyhow, we didn't lose a goddamn thing by quitting this territory?"
"But you can do all those things, Mrs. Mann. You can cross the river with your children and go to where it's safe. You can make a new home over there and plant new crops. You can say that everything that happened on this side was just a dream."
"But what about you?"
"What about me?" He felt cold. There were temptations all around him. Who was he to listen to? He was their prisoner, confined to their expectations—hers, as well as theirs—a captive of their longing. He didn't dare try to escape them. Without them, without their passion, he would be marooned. The solitude didn't concern him. He was adept at making his way alone. But the emptiness would shatter him.
"Maybe we need you," she said. "Maybe we need you so we can get to Luziane. Maybe we need you there so we can stay there."
"You have your husband for that," Houston reminded her.
"That's not the same."
The most remarkable thing happened then. A tear dropped upon Houston's throat and slipped south across his rib cage. She was crying.
Now he understood, or thought he did. Mrs. Mann wanted to return to the States with everything she'd come with. That included the kingdom she'd built in her head, and that in turn included the king. For her to leave Houston and his army wandering in search of empire—her empire, the same as theirs— would make Texas into a haunting. It would make leaving into
getting left, and she had been left enough. It was something plaintive like that, Houston guessed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
They must have slept then because Houston came awake suddenly at the scream. It wasn't yet dawn, but the tent wall was lit gray. Houston had ended up with Mrs. Mann still naked in his arms. He felt the rough-woven saddle blanket underneath them.