by Jeff Long
Then Rusk leapt to the ground and knelt over his fallen comrade. The young man's tall hat had landed upright on the ground and stood beside him like a faithful dog while he writhed every which way, tangling his legs in the grass. The young man cried out, "nothing, nothing, nothing." It was succinct as Houston went galloping by, unable to stop.
All along the breastwork the army was closing with the Mexicans. Those who had any wind left were howling and screeching and yelling Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad. The ones who knew better didn't say Goliad, but the proper name La Bahia,, which they pronounced Laberdy. Remember, they shouted. The notion that memory could justify and even vindicate them was like acid liquor.
The battle coalesced on every side of Houston. It flooded every sense. Wherever he turned he was in the thick of it. The
scream of men and horses and gunfire orbited him. Gunsmoke thickened into an ugly yellow fog. It buoyed him like a myth. He began to lose his fear. Suddenly it was so easy to believe he was untouchable, because no dreamer ever died in his own dream. And outside the borders of his ferocious imagining there was only Texas and Texas was desire. She had killed off a thousand men, but for him her arms were wide open. The truth of it surged through his heart. She had selected him. He was the chosen one.
For the first time in his entire life Houston felt certainty. He had been in revolution since childhood, mounting one ambivalence after another against the world. It could end now because it could begin. He was freed. Against that even the possibility of death lost its value. He was freed of it all.
Houston quit sawing at the reins. There was no use trying to slow whatever was going to happen. Instead he leaned into it and gave it speed. With both legs he clutched hard at his stallion. He dug his single right spur into the ribs and cried, "gee haw," and slapped at his flank with the flat of the sword.
Saracen jumped to clear a keg. It was an ecstatic leap and Houston filled it with his sense of utter liberation. The horse kicked loose of the earth and thrust high with his giant head and Houston thought, Man and beast, they were joined together now. They had become his eagle.
In fact it was the stallion's way of dying.
They began to descend. Saracen's leap had not taken them very high at all, but it seemed to Houston like an infinite descent. Time slowed. He heard the air whistling out through holes in his stallion's great lungs and the blood frothed up like sea spray. It riddled his calves and thighs with red foam.
My God, I've killed us. He had punctured his horse with the spurring, Houston was sure of it. But then, more rationally, it came to him that they were bullet holes. With the realization came two, then three more bullets. The balls struck like an ax bit seating deep into soft wood—big, solid, chunk-cutting sounds. The horse quivered.
And still they fell. Texas loomed beneath them. The land took on a transparency. Houston saw the underworld through it. They were going to be swallowed. His rapture turned to dread.
Saracen landed gently. His legs crumpled under him but
somehow the animal kept upright, tumbling neither to the right nor left. Houston found himself deposited onto his feet. It was stupefying, to be one moment slinging sunward upon a huge winged horse and the next to find himself reduced to standing stock-still upon the earth. His flesh weighed gross and heavy on his bones and he felt captured all over again.
Saracen died the way a mountain dies, his bulk occupying the meadow like some immovable geological fact. With their furious ride across the battlefield forever a thing of the past, the animal's body cooled by slow degrees. Houston stood there and watched. The stallion didn't scream or roll or kick at the sky. Hot blood pumped out through the holes perforating his smooth white rib cage. The vast head sank. All Houston could think to say was "We came a long way to get here." He murmured it. Then the horse was dead.
The battle returned to his senses in bits and pieces. The double bang of muskets sparking the pan and igniting their load roared in a wide sheet of sound, mostly from the American side now. Men scampered about yelling blank excited syllables at one another.
Houston looked around him, dizzy and a little sick to his stomach. The world seemed larger than when he'd been mounted. The view from the saddle had been an expeditious one filled with swooping urgency and a million quick images. On foot, though, it seemed the horizon arced all around like the lip of a vast bowl. His feet felt bound by the soggy ground. Time moved sluggishly down here. And as his soldiers came advancing through the high grass they looked to him like gamboling, famished predators moving upon a sick calf. The deft elegance of the raptor was gone, replaced by whatever it was going to take for them to quit being hungry.
The wave of Americans stormed past him like the cold north gusting. Houston called out to them, relieved to be in their midst. But no one stopped. No one showed the slightest recognition of him. They surged around him and went on, leaving their general flatfooted and with his jaw agape, stranded there beside the shattered hulk of his horse. Three men in ragged city clothes galloped past on farm horses caterwauling at the top of their lungs. One jumped over the dead stallion, clipping Houston's saddle with a hoof. Houston had to leap out of the way or be churned under. Old Man Curtis loped by with
a hatchet in one hand and in the other a musket with smoke pouring from the muzzle. "You kilt my Wash Cottle," he screeched madly. "Remember Wash Cottle."
The Mexican breastworks were useless against the tide of wild men. The more nimble among them vaulted over the collection of sticks and saddles and boxes. Most just shoved and scrabbled their way through as if the piled-up wall were a drift of powder snow. Houston took a few steps one way, then returned in a daze to his horse.
Glancing down, Houston saw the rust-stained dress sword hanging loosely from his right hand. He hefted it back into his grip and twisted around in a circle, wondering what to do next. Saracen's death had robbed his momentum. There seemed to be nowhere for him to go and nothing for him to do. Alone he stood there frozen and immobile while the rest of the solar system slung around and around him.
"General," he heard, and there was Colonel Rusk on horseback, leading up a second mount by the reins. The colonel had blood to his elbows and the horse he offered to Houston had gore smeared over its neck and shoulders and all across the saddle.
"Are we carrying the day?" Houston asked. Rusk seemed not to hear him. Houston pulled himself up into the bloody saddle, seating himself with a wet plop.
"Hell yes," Houston grunted, feeling considerably better with a horse situated under him and with this elevated vantage of the land. At eye level with Rusk now, Houston saw tears streaking the colonel's grimy cheeks. Dr. Patrick must have died. How many other casualties might be lying in the grass, Houston couldn't guess.
Rusk didn't wait for another word. Vengeance showed like lockjaw on his square face. He kicked his horse and bolted off, leaving Houston to investigate the battle's progress. He'd lost all sense of the army's direction and timing. With the sun buried in the thick sulfurous blanket of gunsmoke Houston couldn't remember how long the battle might have been raging, nor even which way their camp lay. He wandered about, chewing at the gummy smoke.
The breastworks had been shattered. Hundreds of holes had been shouldered and kicked and rammed through the loose construction and Houston's army was deep inside the camp
now. Soldiers—both Mexican and American—were running everywhere. The stampeding horses and mules had chopped dozens of Santa Anna's small slender infantrymen to bones and rags. Officers' tents had been plowed underfoot and scattered campfires had spread into the wet grass, where they smoldered with thick white smoke. The livestock was running in giant revolutions and the humanity swirled in crazy paths. The maelstrom defied all prediction. Houston couldn't determine who was winning and who was losing. He wasn't certain how victory should have looked.
To the far left, down where the 2nd Regiment had overrun the sleeping reinforcements, men in buckskins and homespun were circulating through the grass, every n
ow and then bending over to worry at things on the ground. They seemed casual in their motion.
But near the center, where the Mexican cannon had been placed, the battle was still a pitched contest. Under the calm direction of a tall Mexican officer, artillerymen and other soldiers were trying to hold off the enemy long enough to jam another load of grapeshot down the tube and fire. The officer's uniform jacket was open and his long silver hair hung like a lion's mane. His men scrambled to obey, but they were losing against time. Perhaps a hundred Americans had surrounded them and suddenly they were pouring gunfire into the position. The Mexicans pitched and blew backward and sideways, raining blood and bits of flesh on one another. They fell against the caisson wheels and hugged and slapped at the cannon barrel, screaming and praying.
Somehow the silver-haired Mexican officer was left standing alone among the ruin. Neither running nor flinching, he simply folded his arms, and waited for the American riflemen to finish frantically reloading. Something like a smile crossed his face. Houston needled his horse to a sprint, making straight for the officer. Here was a rare man worth preserving. Empty-handed, he could look into a gunbarrel and smile and wait.
"Hold your fire," Houston yelled at his men. He reached the outer ring of shooters in time to knock one rifle off its mark with his sword. The rest cut loose at will. The balls knocked the officer ten feet and nearly cut his head off.
Instantly the Americans swarmed over the artillery with butcher knives in hand. Even shot to pieces some of the Mexi-
cans were still moving, but not for long. The Americans fell upon the bodies, two and three and four to a man, and their knives and gun butts slugged down and up and down. Elsewhere short brown men and boys in pieces of blue and white and red cotton uniforms were scampering about, some toward the lake behind camp, some toward the timber and bayou, some even toward the American camp. Most had tall gaunt pursuers who ran after them screaming and shouting.
A Mexican boy suddenly materialized from the grass and dashed straight against the right shoulder of Houston's horse. He was slight and his impact barely raised a twitch. A deerfly would have gotten more attention from the horse. The boy bounced backward, then scrambled to his feet and stood in place. There was not a hair on his smooth walnut face and he looked barely twelve years old.
"That one's mine," a big man cried out. Houston remembered this fellow. He was a farmer from Georgia who had cried one night talking about his sweet wife and red soil. "I seen him, he's mine." He slashed through the grass with his old musket at hip level and pointed at the child's head.
"Leave that child alone," Houston ordered.
The farmer glowered at Houston, then recognized his general. An ugly joy crossed his face. He didn't object, just let his rifle muzzle drift up from the ground so that it was trained on Houston. It was a lazy accidental kind of motion, but there was no mistaking the knuckles squeezing white around the stock. The man waited curiously to see what Houston was going to do about it.
"Get that goddamn gun off of me," Houston said.
The farmer looked down at his gun and feigned surprise at its direction, as if the thing had a mind of its own. Then he swung it back toward the Mexican boy and coldly pulled the trigger. The ball passed through one thigh bone and shattered the second thigh, too.
"Madre de Dios," the boy shrieked. He fell in a pile of limbs into the grass.
"Goddamn you," Houston said to the farmer.
"Remember the Alamo," the farmer crowed hoarsely.
The little boy reached his arm up from the grass. "Me no Alamo," he pleaded.
The farmer yanked a huge scoop of a knife from a beaded
sheath and bent over the boy. Houston raised his sword to strike the man down, but when he swung it was with the flat of the blade. The big farmer didn't flinch. Houston tried to bring himself to run the man through, but couldn't. He turned away from the gutting and rode slowly across the plain.
The battle was no longer a battle. It was a hunt. Everywhere Houston turned his soldiers were tracking and seizing prey. They pounced on the slightest movement of grass, scything it away with their gun butts or with knives and swords. They uncovered Mexicans crawling away or lying wounded or on their knees praying for salvation or just for their souls. The few who had muskets in their hands immediately tossed them down and threw their arms out in surrender. Most had no weapon at all.
Houston led his horse through the carnage between curtains of noise that was even thicker than the gunsmoke. It was a hideous passage through sights and sounds he'd figured were closed off to him forever. Horseshoe Bend had been mean and ugly. But at least there the Creeks had fought to the end. They had been a foe. Here the Mexicans were no longer even fighting. They were simply dying.
Houston was stunned. It was beyond his comprehension how quickly his army had spun out of control. The men had never truly been in his control, there had been symptoms of that all along. But he'd believed they were at least in control of themselves.
"Cease fire," Houston shouted as he rode among them. It was the wrong command. Bullets still hummed through the air, but the crackling of gunfire was moving off to the south and east, over in the direction of the bayou. Here on the savannah and in the camp Houston's men had largely given up on the tedium of reloading. Instead, in their madness, they had turned their guns around to use as clubs. A soldier never clubbed his gun unless he was desperate, for it nearly always broke or bent the weapon. But the only desperation Houston could see here was a race to feed their growing blood frenzy. They moved like hounds baying up a panther or a bear.
Five men in a melange of tattered city clothes and buckskins discovered a Mexican cradling his dead comrade's body. He was weeping and rocking the gray corpse and it was clear from their identical faces that these two had been brothers. Houston
spurred his horse and bore down on the scene. From far away, it seemed to him, his voice reached in among the circling men.
"That's enough now," he said to his soldiers. "We have won. Texas is ours."
"Not yet it's not," one retorted. "We got to break their defiance."
"They've had enough," Houston said.
A fellow with wide fat cheeks and a pistol said, "Whatever you say, General."
"That's what I say," Houston said.
Houston pulled his mustang's head up, unexpectedly proud of himself. They were going to listen to him. It was in his power to stem this killing fever. But no sooner was his back turned than the pistol went off. Houston swung around and the one Mexican was slumping across his brother. His bare feet were still twitching as the soldiers set upon the pair of brothers with knives, working them like a pair of beeves. In shock Houston drifted on, going nowhere in particular. He had become a tourist in his own war.
"Houston," someone yelled at him. It came as an accusation, perhaps, or a warning, or an identifying. He heard the rifle go off and glanced to the right. Down by his foot a bluebonnet toppled off its stem, sliced in two. Houston saw the flower tumble. The bullet snapped a hole in his boot. Inside the leather he felt his ankle explode.
"Ah God," Houston roared. He reached down for the boot. He needed to tear it away and empty out the pain. But the little mustang was screaming and already falling. It was all Houston could do to keep his sword—the damned sword—away from his face and hope the horse wouldn't crush his shot ankle.
The little horse dropped hard, flailing with her hooves to fight death's talons off her belly. She was too late for that. Her belly was already open. It emptied out. Yard after yard of slick viscera dumped loose like eels escaping. When the mustang got a smell of her own insides, she screamed again, and Houston shoved himself loose before she could roll over on him and break his spine or climb to her feet and bolt off in a death gallop, dragging him caught in the stirrups.
He hoicked and pulled himself through the grass, putting distance between him and the mustang's slashing hooves. When he was far enough away Houston jammed his sword into the
turf and, w
ith both hands hooked under his knee, pulled the wounded ankle closer for a look. There was a finger-sized hole in the boot right above the Achilles heel and blood was pumping through it. It seemed entirely possible that his foot had been severed in there and might come loose with the boot. He decided to leave the boot on.
His vision went black for a moment and he slid backward into the grass. Then he noticed the butterflies. There was a flood of them just above the grasses. Agitated by the war or just by the advent of sunset, hundreds, thousands, of orange and black and red and bright blue butterflies were beating at the sunlight, hovering at thigh level all across the plain. They could have been a million flowers set free to fly about, it was that pretty. Houston took a breath. The air was sweeter down here, even with the stink of fresh horse gut. If he closed his eyes, the smell of spring grass almost returned him to the days when a child named Samuel had crawled among the cornstalks and rye. He opened his eyes and there, high overhead, hung a canopy of smoke and killing and manhood—legends, remote and epic.
A lithe childlike figure came running through the grass and Houston thought it was a rescuer, but the boy was simply running past.
"Wait," he called, then, more hopefully, "Tad?"
Since that wasn't the boy's name anyway, he didn't slow down. Houston lunged and caught him by one tattered pantleg. Now that the fight had gone hand to hand the Twin Sisters were of no more use and their crews had abandoned them to get into the thick of the fight. The child had a knife in one hand.