by Jeff Long
It was a real scream, not something out of his dreams, nor like the alarm that had fooled Colonel Forbes. The edges of the scream resonated in the air, stitching the other sounds of early morning: a dove, a horse cropping grass nearby, someone pissing against a tree. Houston tried to disentangle himself quietly, but she woke up.
"Sam," she sadly breathed. The rapture was already fading. She had a husband, alive, worthless, cowering in Louisiana, but a husband all the same. She was no Molly. Houston was no Mosely. They were too seasoned for that kind of passion and misery to last more than a few hours. For better or worse each had a life to return to.
"You didn't hear it?" Houston asked her.
Mrs. Mann frowned.
"Stay here," Houston said, in part to ensure her safety, but mostly to have someone overseeing his possessions. Things had a way of walking off in this camp. He got into his pants and boots and shirt and emerged only half put together. Huddled to one side of his tent door, Houston's self-appointed guardian, Tad, smiled his "morning." Then the boy glimpsed the nude woman inside and went silent. Houston dropped the tent door shut.
"What happened out here?" he said to the boy.
The boy went on staring at the tent door, blinking wide-eyed the way lepers did. An expression of disapproval ate across his face. Houston didn't prompt him again. Other people had begun to rise up and filter through the camp, between the trees, all in a certain direction.
"This way," Houston said to the shocked child.
By the time he got to the stream, over a hundred people had collected. It was almost like a baptism, with the sun throwing peach along the horizon and the water so pure. They stood
in a broad oval surrounding a stout girl who was sobbing and a confused man who was scarcely awake, sitting on his rump, shaking at his hangover. Molly appeared from the crowd and wrapped her long arms around the girl and gathered the sobs against her sisterly shoulder. Mosely appeared. Molly spoke to him, though it was with all the love scrubbed off her face. That was gone, and from Mosely, too. Their beautiful faces had been replaced by two cold stones.
"Fetch a rope," Mosely called out with grim authority. "Get a horse." That was lynch talk. Houston had heard it used a dozen times in his lifetime. When the man on his rump tried to stand, Mosely pushed him down with one foot. Now Houston saw it was the man called Popcorn. At the colonel's direction three men jumped in and pinned him to the ground.
It took no genius to add up the parts. The girl had found him sleeping. Popcorn's raping had caught up with him. Ordinarily that would have been the end of it. Houston would have faded back into his tent and given the incident a half hour to get over with. But this was his army, his people. And justice had to come from the top down or else it wasn't justice.
"What's going on here, Colonel Baker?"
Mosely whipped a glance at him. "By God," he said. "The man defiled a woman. We're going to stretch his bastard neck." He said it like a man eating chalk.
"Let's bring that fellow around to my tent," Houston quietly reasoned. "We'll do things right, Mosely."
Something in Mosely ignited. His eyes sparked. He had hatred in his blood, and to Houston's shock it was hatred for him. "Oh, we'll do things right, General," Mosely shouted.
People cheered. They crowded around. A bareback pony was brought up and a rope snaked up and over a tree limb. Houston saw Ned Burleson's face in the crowd and he was enjoying the predicament. Sherman arrived, and over on the left two more colonels showed up. It was a full audience.
"Stand down," Houston hissed at Mosely, still hoping the defiance was an accident. They could go to his tent and sort this out. Houston could jump up a court martial and within the hour Popcorn could be tried, sentenced, and swinging, and there could be a proper signature to the whole affair. Everybody would get what they wanted.
Houston gripped Mosely's arm, the kind of thing an older man could rightly do. "We'll do this in its proper order," he advised. He may as well have grabbed a wildcat.
Instantly, as if fighting off an attack, Mosely twisted away. When his hand came up there was a foot-long butcher knife in it. It surprised both of them. Mosely swallowed. He held the knife higher between them, like a man contemplating a barter.
"I know the goddamn order of things," he rasped. He was belligerent, but anguished, too. Suddenly Houston remembered Mosely's indecision and helplessness before the mob in Gonzales. He realized that it must have shamed his colonel almost to death, and that his indecision then wasn't going to be repeated now.
"Gig him," someone called to Mosely, deliberately unclear as to which they wanted to see stuck, Houston or Popcorn. One thing was certain, though. The knife was out. Mosely was going to have to use it. That was the imperative and Houston knew it. There might be no such thing as predestination, but the kind of code that came with a drawn knife was the next closest thing. He stared at Mosely through the bright blade.
"Mosely!" The voice crashed against their impasse. Still holding the stout girl, Molly stood facing them ten feet away, but with her eyes closed. Houston had once seen a granny shaman find her trance state that way in a dark Georgia forest. She was going to witch them. Molly ran her tongue across her lips like an archer whetting the feather. But when she opened her eyes and stared at her haunted lover, Molly said nothing. She didn't have to. Mosely remembered himself.
"First things first," Mosely said, and then he used the knife. He bent. With one stroke he sliced open Popcorn's pants.
"Don't you do me." Popcorn thrashed around. "I'll hex your babies and your babies' babies."
Mosely barked his annoyance. His baby was already cursed.
"Mosely," Houston said. He was frightened and sad at the same time. Molly had saved him, but he felt lost. He was losing Mosely. Mosely was losing himself.
The colonel dropped to one knee between the wide open, pinned-down legs. It took no longer than a good grip and a quick pull with the knife.
"Ah Jesus," Popcorn prayed with a shriek. "You did it."
Mosely dropped the palmful of flesh into the dirt and wiped his hand on his leg. Now that it was done, he seemed sick.
One of the soldiers poked the mess with a bare toe. "Ouch," he said, "nuts and pizzle, the works." Men and women were shouting jokes and taunts at Popcorn.
Now Three-Legged Willie appeared, his strange perpetual hilarity illuminated by the dawn. "Up," he said to the prisoner, "let's see you dance." But of course that wasn't going to happen alone. The three soldiers who'd held him down now boosted Popcorn onto the pony. Back in Houston's hometown in Tennessee, the hangman's fee was $2.50. This bunch was more than ready to do it for free. Mosely dropped the rough hangman's loop over the prisoner's head and cinched it tight. Over at the tree trunk, a helpful refugee woman pulled the rope tight and threw a couple half-hitches to tie it off.
The soldiers had to hold their prisoner on the pony so he wouldn't hang himself before it was time. The terrible wound between Popcorn's legs quickly painted the mount red and he kept sliding right and left, magnifying his agony. Houston wished for his pistols, one to shoot Popcorn, the other to shoot . . . someone. The faces in the crowd were hideous. Houston's hands opened and closed on empty air. He stood there horrified by his own inaction.
Three-Legged Willie let go of the pony's reins. The pony sauntered forward, no need for a gallop, and the rope came taut. Popcorn slid backward slowly across the wet horseflesh.
Many in the crowd had seen hangings. The children who were new to it wormed their way to the front or climbed into neighboring trees to watch. They were fascinated but nervous, too, not knowing what to expect or what was expected of them.
The hanging took longer than most because the tree limb bent and the rope was elastic with rain. Consequently Popcorn's bare toes could just touch the earth and his dying brain seemed to register hope. He pushed against the ground and the rope pulled him up then let him down and then he pushed again. Like that he yo-yoed up and down for several minutes, neither alive nor dead, just
bounding between escape and surrender with his face going black and his eyes bulging.
"That's the way Colonel Bowie got the Mexicans to talk,
you know," Burleson said. "I watched him at it. Tie 'em up, then drop 'em down, then tie 'em up, drop 'em. Every one of 'em, they talked. Well, whispered."
"He's like a snap of popcorn himself," Willie said. The prisoner's hands and feet kept flexing and springing open. Every time he twitched and jumped the wound sprayed more blood. No one moved from the deep circle of witnesses.
"Goddamn it," Houston swore to himself. It was Horseshoe Bend all over again. Jackson had told his soldiers to count the Creeks by cutting their noses off, and that had led to every manner of cutting: ears, scalps, fingers, scrotums, heads. There had been tales of cannibalism. Lying in the dirt practically dead himself, Houston had seen their gory harvest. He'd never dared to ask the Old Chieftain directly about how he could have let the savagery pass. Of all the brutal things Jackson had done to gain and keep power, it was the one thing Houston despised him for. And now he had his own army. He was the same age as Jackson had been at the Bend. He had an empire to capture, a map to redraw, a people to rule. He was Jackson's protege. And yet from the start he had vowed things would be different.
"If this is your notion of swift justice, Houston," Wharton spoke facetiously, "Lord help me from you."
"He is the most natural born dancer I've ever seen," Willie quipped, then sang a little ditty. "Hornpipes, strathspeys, jibs and reels/Put life and mettle in our heels." He jigged about on his crutch.
Popcorn's antics went on. His longevity drew admiring remarks. Someone introduced the possibility of freeing Popcorn now that he'd learned his lesson and reinducting him into the army, because "that man don't quit."
Abruptly Deaf Smith was among them. Moving swiftly, like a bird of prey, he got behind the hoicking gasping prisoner and wrapped his arms around the man's waist. The next time Popcorn's feet touched ground, the scout kicked the legs free. Then he leaned back and set his own weight against the rope.
The branch or the rope or both creaked loudly. The weight of both men against the noose was too much. Something had to give and it did. Houston heard the spinal bones pop loose and just as quickly Popcorn grew a ten-inch neck. His legs quit jacking. His hands and feet quit balling and opening. Smith let go. He stepped away with a set jaw, his grim duty done.
"For mercy sake," he said to them and walked off, disgusted. The crowd started to melt away. A few soldiers tarried to discuss dying. Some of the children took sticks and poked some more motion out of Popcorn's dead weight. The long shadow swung back and forth.
"What do you think, Houston?" It was Burleson. "Are they hungry enough when they start to eat their own?"
Chapter Nine
Where the road forked, there was a tree. Houston found some soldiers standing there gaping up at a dead buzzard stuck belly-out on a sharp twig. A roll of paper fluttered on a bit of string tied to one yellow leg. It was a Mexican custom—the dead bird, the posted message.
Two days ago Houston had sent Juan Seguin north to find General Gaines and his U.S. Army regulars. Now he untied the string to read Seguin's report. The square of paper was blank. Gaines hadn't crossed the border. Houston was on his own.
One fork led toward the Gulf. The other led north to Nacogdoches. Either way the Mexicans were going to chase and fight them. Through force of will he'd kept them out of harm's way for almost forty days and nights. Caution dictated they should aim for Nacogdoches, because even if Gaines didn't invade Mexico and come to the rescue, at least Houston's army could escape into Louisiana. But the army seemed bent on no escape. They seemed to enjoy trapping themselves in citadels and cul-de-sacs and baiting their enemy into attack. Recklessness seemed to be an Anglo-Saxon flaw.
Houston saw his prairie boy Tad hunkered down in the shade resting. Since discovering the general with a woman, he had made himself scarce. Houston had begun to hope the child had attached to the refugee column and made his escape from Texas.
"Which way?" he asked the child.
The boy stared suspiciously.
"I could flip a coin," Houston said. "Or you could say."
Tad shrugged. Is this the final innocence? Houston wondered. To choose not to choose?
As it went he didn't pick which way the army would turn. The general just sat beneath the buzzard on the tree and watched his troops make their own decision. Naturally they chose the path to apocalypse. They poured south along the trail toward Harrisburg and Lynchburg and the bayou country.
A soldier saluted with more enthusiasm than Houston had seen through the entire march. "I knew you had the Go Ahead, by gad, General."
The word passed down the line: They were heading south. Houston could hear them cheering far back in the trees. As they slogged past, their step quickened, their eyes glittered.
It was a strange feeling to see how his inertia gave them energy. At his weakest, they seemed their strongest. At his most indecisive, they were like steel. He felt transparent. It was a moment not without joy. He had become their vessel. He trusted them to guide him down the right path. Whichever path they chose, it would be right.
"Hurrah for Old Sam," they cheered.
The way children anticipate Christmas morning, Houston's soldiers could hardly wait for their battle. He had never seen men so seriously happy about the advent of bloodshed. These men were. He looked for the smallest hint of dread in them. They had none. They wanted the fight more than anything in the world. Houston concentrated on their glee and sudden kindness to one another and on the yellow sunlight that seemed to release more wildflowers by the minute.
Houston could see their seriousness by the way they'd begun harvesting cobwebs. Every place that might harbor a spider, men could be seen on their hands and knees like boys scrambling for parade candy, hunting up webs. When one got found, they would carefully detach the threads from the anchor points and pinch the web into a ball and store it for later use. There was no better staunch for a bullet hole or bayonet hole than spider silk.
There were other signs, other preparations for battle. One enterprising man turned a good profit hawking little vials of honey with gold filings from Spanish and Mexican pesos. He promoted the concoction as "instantaneous energy" and recom-
mended his buyers imbibe it just before battle. Houston rode past another man preaching a diet of lead shavings as a form of bulletproofing, and saw several others devising little fetishes from feathers and rawhide string and pieces of animal bones. He heard a scholarly debate over seating their musket balls in six-hundred-thread linen—the same as Daniel Boone once used—versus patching with pieces cut from an ordinary shirt-tail.
With the heat of day some stripped to sleeveless leather jackets or went bareback and Houston observed that his men and some of the boys, too, seemed to be sprouting more fur by the day, growing thick mats of it on their cheeks and foreheads and the backs of their hands and shoulders. Some painted their arms and faces black, Creek-style. Men could be seen hardening their thumbnails in the campfires, tempering them like steel to gouge out the enemy's eyes.
The doctors made their own preparations. Even from a distance Dr. Labadie and Dr. Patrick were readily identifiable, for they'd taken to pouncing on every abandoned rag for bandages, tucking the loose ends into their belts and wallets and vests until they resembled tattered clowns. As they walked along the learned men debated cures and techniques and examined local plants for possible use as medicines. Houston rode alongside the two surgeons for a stretch.
"Ah, here, a second opinion," Dr. Labadie said. "Maybe you can tell us your preference, the calomel physician or the steam physician?"
Houston knew both types from his long search for a true healer. "Well, I've been calomized and steamed pretty profoundly," Houston said.
"You sound dissatisfied." Dr. Patrick laughed.
"I'll be most satisfied if you can save even one of these boys without the guesswork that has been practi
ced upon me."
"Guesswork is all we have sometimes," Dr. Labadie retorted.
"Unfortunately," Houston wryly agreed.
The army worked along the upper bank of Buffalo Bayou until a passage could be cobbled together. They changed over to the other shore with a leaky flatboat and rafts made of logs and house doors that still had the hinges on them, and continued on.
At one final boggy creek they found a stout new bridge of white and blond timbers built by the slaves of four brothers named Vince. After so much wading and ferrying Houston felt cheered by the dry crossing.
On the far side of the Vinces' bridge the army resumed its march. They found themselves upon a virtual island, long and wide and surrounded on all sides by waterways and a lake and swampland. The island was not quite flat, having a gentle spine running from left to right. The grass stood high and emerald green and the field sparkled with brilliant wildflowers. It was a fine day to be lazy. You would never have known they were hunting for war.
Houston had a sense that he and his army could have gone on and on under those languid sunbeams. He conjured up an image of Stephen Austin's painstakingly drawn map of Texas with its blank spaces and medieval notations "mustangs here" and its incomplete borders, and he tried to imagine where they might be and how far they might go. Forever, it seemed. Ounce by ounce they would lose weight and flesh, and finally disintegrate into puffs of wind that never reached an end. The Mexican wind could chase the American wind into infinity.
At the island's upper tip, where the road dipped into a dense pack of trees, they came face to face with the San Jacinto River. The road ran straight into the water.
The river was swollen thick with chocolate brown runoff. The waters placidly funneled toward the sea. They had reached Lynch's Ferry and somewhere among the thick humid shadows on the opposite shore lay the little town of Lynchburg. While Houston sat on his horse facing the river, his officers gathered around.