Empire of bones

by Jeff Long

  "I need a horse," Houston said to him. "Go catch me a horse, son." It wouldn't do for him to be afoot, nor to be chasing about trying to wrangle a mount. In the middle of storm and strife a commander was supposed to be commanding. At the battle of San Jacinto men fought and died and Houston caught himself a pony. Maybe Crockett could have turned such a thing to advantage, but farce wasn't Houston's strong suit.

  The boy tore away from Houston's grip and growled, crouching in the grass. Houston took his hand back, unnerved. A grim incandescent gleam lit the boy's face and there was not a hint of recollection in his bloodshot eyes. Only an hour ago— no, less than that—Houston had teased this boy and his crew

  into blushing. It might as well have happened in another century, on another continent. The way fever victims sometimes did the child had boiled over. The world had become a stranger to him. At any rate the general was a stranger. The boy raised his knife, a thin clasp blade. Houston saw blood on the metal and dripping from the boy's knuckles.

  "Oh, child," he murmured sadly. Whether it was seeing Houston's white skin or hearing words spoken in English, the boy decided against killing him. He lowered the knife and rushed on wordlessly. Houston felt heartbroken.

  Now the pain began. Like a mean dog that lets go just to get a better grip, the pain slipped a little, then tightened with a vengeance. It bit harder, then bit some more. Houston put his head back. He wanted to howl but didn't dare. / am their general. The reality wouldn't let him go.

  Men sprinted by in the high grass. He heard their laughter. Children playing tag on a summer eve. Houston almost called to them but didn't, not sure if they were friend or foe.

  "Found him," a man sang out happily. The whip-whip of more legs through grass joined the finder.

  "Four inches?" one of the men offered to his partners. "Anybody wager?"

  "Five," someone said.

  "Five then. But hold that little pilgrim tight. This will take some scientifical doing."

  A man's voice turned into a woman's. The shrill cry rose higher. What was remarkable about it was how long and unbroken it went on. Houston stared dumbly at his bloody palms. Tears welled up and fouled his vision. He blinked them away and saw a tiny butterfly fixed on the toe of his boot, resting.

  The woman's scream ran out of air. It became a man's voice again, Mexican. "Perdonelos," it said. Forgive me? Houston wondered. Then he realized the man was forgiving his captors for whatever it was they were doing.

  "One more inch," the gambler urged.

  "Goddamn it," someone complained.

  "He's took the dark leap," another voice observed. "Wasn't but four inches."

  "You lose, George. I told you. Wrong rib."

  George grumbled. "He was too skinny, by God." They turned the Mexican's body loose and it flopped heavily on the

  ground. Houston's father used to bring home meat that way, near dusk, dumping it off the rump of his horse. It would drop to earth with a finality that said the spirit was gone, the animal would never move again. Houston closed his mouth. The butterfly was gone.

  "There's another," someone yelled and off they went, slashing through the grass. They left Houston alone. He didn't dare call out to them. He remembered Robinson Crusoe choosing solitude over the company of pirates and cannibals.

  The mustang's eyes were wide open. After a while the big rib cage quit and the viscera quit pumping. It was none too soon for Houston who found himself getting irritated that life would hang on so long and for no good reason except the pure suffering.

  "Goddamn it," he groaned at his leg. But at least he'd found a safe refuge. With cannibals and cavalrymen streaming back and forth across the battlefield he had this cup of grass to call his own. They could have their battle. If not for the demon gnashing on his leg bone, Houston might have gone to sleep.

  "General?"

  Houston started. Behind him, practically overhead, a rider was sitting with his back to the sun. Houston squinted in the smoke and flashing sunlight. Blood and gore glistened on his slick leather suit.

  "Mr. Smith?" Houston said.

  "I thought sure we lost you," Deaf Smith said. A tinge of grief still painted his voice. Smith's bay snorted then stretched his columned neck down and took a mouthful of grass from beside Houston's head.

  "Here I am," Houston said.

  Smith dismounted. He wrapped the reins around his fist, taking no chances on getting stranded in this ocean of grass. "Is that the whole of it?" he asked, pointing at Houston's ankle wound. The way he said it diminished the wound. It didn't lessen the pain, but the pain took on an odd poverty. Suddenly Houston knew he was going to have to rise up and reenter the dangerous sky and try to lead these rebellious souls to some sort of salvation.

  "I've finished resting," Houston said. He took Smith's hand on one side and the bay's stirrup on the other and hoisted himself to standing. The effort almost cost his consciousness,

  but he managed to stay upright until the fainting passed. He pulled his rusty sword out of the wet ground and surveyed the battlefield. Where two thousand men had been joined in a semblance of battle there were now fewer than two hundred in view. Houston looked all around. It was as if the savannah had swallowed up both armies.

  The hiss of bullets had largely stopped. Houston could hear wounded horses screaming and thrashing in the grass. Others just stood in place, tired from so much running around. Most grazed peacefully, though a few hung their heads and bled through the nostrils. Houston's questioning look prompted Smith. "They've gone to the bayou," he said with disgust, "back in there by the lake."

  Houston didn't know what to make of that. He heard a clattering of gunfire from behind the trees Smith pointed at. Here on the plain, though, some of the quiet was beginning to return. Maybe the killing hadn't been so bad after all.

  And yet Houston realized he was wrong. They hadn't won Texas. They hadn't gained a peace at all. They might have won this day, but only over a fraction of the Mexican army. After today's fight his soldiers would be tired and disorganized and their weapons would be broken from clubbing. They had just made themselves eminently vulnerable. They were in greater peril than ever before. At this very moment a hundred armed Mexican soldiers under a single good leader could sweep them from the field.

  "Are you sure the Vinces' bridge is down?" Houston asked.

  "Burnt out," Smith said.

  "But you're sure," Houston reiterated. He scanned the western reaches for any new Mexican battalions. There was nothing to see. But he was losing blood, and he'd struck his head when the mustang fell, and the smoke was thick. A fresh new army could have been three hundred yards away and invisible to him.

  "I must speak to the men," Houston said. "I've got to warn them, get them organized." His head ached. He wanted water.

  "They won't hear you," Smith said. "Maybe later. When they come back to us."

  "Come back?" But Houston knew what the old scout meant. The bloodlust had to cool. Suddenly Houston slumped. The

  string went out of his good leg and he barely managed to catch himself against the bay's saddle. He was panting and lowered his head. His boot was filling with blood faster than the bul-lethole could drain it. Blood seeped over the top.

  "Take my horse, General," Smith said. "Go back to camp. You've got nothing more to do out here. When it's over and done with they'll stray home."

  Smith was right. The battle was finished. It had been finished almost before it began. The rest was sheer homicide. It couldn't even be called vengeance, what was going on. Almost none of these men had known their so-called brothers at the Alamo and Goliad. They weren't killing out of any genuine spirit of revenge. Remembering was just an excuse. They were killing because no one could command them not to. And that meant Smith was mistaken. Houston had things to do out here.

  "If you'll oblige me with just a little push, Mr. Smith." He couldn't stand on his right foot long enough to get his left in the stirrup. With Smith's help Houston crawled and humped his way into the
saddle. Smith handed up the dress sword, which had acquired a sideways crook in the metal.

  Houston set off through the veils of smoke, aiming for the lake. Along the way he discovered where many of the Mexican soldiers had disappeared to. In a sense the earth had swallowed them up. Singly and in bunches they lay twisted and heaped and stretched out in the grasses. Passing through the shattered breastworks, Houston found men so shot up that their flesh hung in tatters. He looked for the Mexican general who had stood by his cannon so nobly. He was able to find the man only by his mane of white hair, what was left of it. Over in a pile of boxes what was left of a human body had been stripped and mutilated. Someone had lifted the richest part of the scalp.

  Deeper in the camp Houston could tell where his men had lost patience with reloading. The corpses were hacked with butcher knives or their skulls and faces were caved in. Houston told himself this was war. He insisted upon it. But it didn't work. This was an outright massacre. Forever more it would be the face behind their mask.

  Houston searched for the body of a white man, any white man. He found none.

  At his approach dozens of his soldiers lifted up from their looting and knife work. They didn't look to see who the rider

  was, only to judge if he could be killed. They emerged from collapsed tents like vultures drawing their heads out from a buffalo carcass. Several were cutting away dead men's noses and ears, no different from what Old Hickory had ordered at Horseshoe Bend. As if questing for some deepest forbiddance, some of the corpses had been opened up and their livers and hearts stolen. Houston weighed how much this might be his own fault. Could it be that he had failed them, that they were innocent and didn't know better? Perhaps he should have instructed them about the temptation.

  / will cut down the man who makes a meal of this, Houston tried to declare. But his voice wouldn't come out. He could scarcely breathe. He rode on. What looked like a windfall of sticks and twigs littered the ground. They were British muskets—Mexican issue—that had been thrown to the ground by fleeing soldiers. The discarded weapons cracked and snapped underhoof, so much kindling.

  The trail of bodies led on and on, through the timber, out to the lake. That was where Houston found the rest of his army. The Mexicans had fled to the water's edge with an eye to crossing the bayou and escaping into the far thickets or following the San Jacinto downriver to the ocean. Maybe some had made it. From the looks of things, probably none had.

  The problem, once again, was illusion. What appeared to be a narrow span of shallow water was actually deep and rimmed with swamp mud. No better mantrap could have been devised. Here was proof that God didn't belong to the Papists, not the God of mercy anyway. The killing Houston had witnessed on the savannah didn't begin to compare with the horror at this false crossing.

  Like sheep bunching at a gate, the Mexicans had bottle-necked against the water and their enemy had come right behind. Utterly desperate the Mexicans were leaping and crawling and wrestling over one another in an effort to get away. The muddy beach had sucked many to a standstill, where they'd been bludgeoned and stabbed and shot. Between the blood and the bayou slime that plastered them, the Mexicans looked less like humans than amphibious creatures hatching out by the hundreds. Their slick limbs tangled and writhed. They had no faces, just muddy masks with holes for eyes and mouths.

  Houston had never heard such howling and screaming in

  his lifetime, and that included hearing Red Sticks burned alive at the Bend. Hell wasn't just a place of fire after all. It was a place of water also, and Satan's gang wasn't demons but the very men Houston had embraced as children.

  The Americans lined the banks. The killing was festive and hilarious and neighborly, exactly like a turkey shoot. A good number of them had thrown away their own guns and taken up the British muskets left behind by the Mexicans. They picked out targets and bet on them and congratulated one another on what fine shots they were. One man killed another sharpshooter's target. The two men goddamned each other, but in a friendly way. No matter how many they shot down, there were still many more Mexicans to kill.

  Houston watched from the trees, his mouth slack, his heart dead. He was shattered. This was wrong. This was evil. Was this Texas?

  Over and over Mexicans in the rear of the press turned around and tried to surrender. They were clubbed down or cut open. Only a few still carried their muskets, and those were wet and useless.

  The muddy flats teemed with Mexicans dragging themselves toward the water. Bodies with their heads and limbs shot away stood at grotesque attention, jutting upright among the reeds. The mud was paved with many more bodies, which helped the Mexicans following to reach the water. There they simply died in greater numbers.

  The water housed its own terrors. Much deeper than it looked, the narrow channel had drowned or slowed countless men who now floated on the surface or sank. It was awful to see hands reach up from the depths and catch at struggling soldiers and drag them under, too. The heads of dead and living men bobbed up and down in the water and these provided the shooters with a greater challenge. The blasted remains stuck above the water like bony chalices. In the center of the channel men and horses had piled so thick in the water they formed a bridge. It too was deceptive. The limbs twitched and moved and snared men trying to climb across, and then they too were shot and added to the bridging.

  Houston knew his men would keep shooting until they ran out of powder or the sun set or there was no one left to shoot.

  Someone had to put a stop to it. But how? Would these animals even understand human language anymore? He told himself to heel Smith's horse forward, to trumpet his wrath upon his own soldiers. But his spirit felt snapped. He shrugged in despair, then shrugged again. My children. More minutes passed. Houston sat paralyzed in the shadows.

  When Tom Rusk came onto the scene his hat was gone. His hair was slicked back and he was in a frenzy. Houston was sure he'd come to avenge Dr. Patrick's death. But Rusk's grief had changed, it had somehow reified.

  "No more," he shouted hoarsely. "Cease your fire."

  He caught a man's musket barrel with his sword and the gun went off, making a little geyser in the water. He hooked another man's barrel and rode his horse into a pack of marksmen, knocking one flat in the mud.

  "These soldiers have surrendered," he yelled. "They are prisoners."

  Three soldiers took aim at Rusk. "Go on now, Colonel," one of them warned.

  Rusk shook his sword at the would-be assassins. A rangy man with a sandy bush for a beard lowered his rifle and grabbed at Rusk's reins. "Let loose," Rusk said, "let loose or I'll kill you."

  "Ha," said the man and he yanked the reins left, turning the horse sharply. He pulled a knife. For a bad moment Houston thought he was going to reach under and slit the mare's throat or else hamstring the colonel. Rusk thought so, too, Houston could tell by his frantic twisting in the saddle.

  Houston broke from the trees. "You," he shouted at the soldier. That was all he could think to say.

  "Sam," Rusk yelled, "we must stop them." He tried to kick his assailant away. But the soldier let loose of Rusk's reins and stepped back and swung his knife in a wild arc. He slashed the horse across the rump, a deep long slice. Rusk reached out to strike the assailant with his sword, but the mare's eyes turned backward at the pain and she tore away, her reins snapping loose.

  "Sam," Rusk cried as he got carried off into the distance.

  Rusk's lonesome cry cut at Houston's despair. "Cease fire," Houston called. "Do you hear me? They are my prisoners."

  "No such thing," said a man with a beard pink with brains.

  He had appalling lost eyes. But Houston refused to look away from them. He made himself search the man's face until he found, under the smoky filth, a spray of boyish freckles across the man's squashed, broken-down nose. It was there, the innocence, and Houston spoke to it.

  "The fight is gone out of them. The fight's gone out of all of them."

  "Says who," the freckled man re
torted.

  "I say so. And I'm your general."

  "So you are," the man said. "Then I'm sorry for you, General."

  Houston flinched. The rest of the men were peering at him through dark sockets, their teeth white in blood-soaked beards. They looked almost incapable of speech.

  "You give us a good slay," the freckled soldier said. "It's a shame you can't see it through."

  His neighbor spoke up. "These are hard times. You go back to camp, sir. We will finish things for you." Houston recalled the man was a store clerk in Sherman's militia.

  "Aye, sir, you get gone," someone else said.

  Another in the bunch raised his rifle and snugged it tight against the skull of a Mexican on his knees.

  "You can't," Houston said. The backbone had fallen out of his voice, though. He was simply playing out his part in this thing, the same as he'd played it through the whole campaign, the same as these men were playing out their parts. Homer was right. Men were puppets in the hands of gods.

  "Can't?" said the soldier.

  The rifle went off. The Mexican's face flapped open like a Chinese box. Houston didn't look away. He told himself he had no right to look away. Some of the pieces patted softly against Houston's cheek.

  "Let me deliver you," Houston murmured. But they had returned to their killing and he sat there, invisible. Houston had thought he was done with retreating. He'd told himself this battle would mark the end of his running away. From here on, he would face down the dictator that was his own memory.

  But he had lost.

  Without another word of protest Houston gently guided Smith's big bay away from the slaughtering and turned his back

  on his men of faith, his buckskinned crusaders, his heroes. Shoulders hunched against the gunsmoke, he returned to the American camp a mile away. There he lay down against a tree to watch the sun flare above the western magnolias and night come on.