Empire of bones

by Jeff Long

  And, really, what was Texas but an act of imagination? Houston tried to articulate what that name conjured up for him. In the name of their revolution he had galloped back and forth across this thing called Texas. He'd fed upon its animals

  and crops, breathed its air, swallowed its dust and rain, woven between its lightning and northers, and slept and bled on it. Texas was in him. It was in his gut, in his blood, in his lungs. Most of all it was in his head, or his heart, wherever the seeds of imagination got stored.

  Santa Anna was still prattling on. Almonte had quit listening. He looked off toward the bayou, then back to Houston. "We have lost Texas," Almonte sighed. "And you have won it. I see that now."

  Houston wished he felt the same certainty. Even if the Mexican army never attacked again, there were the Comanches and land speculators and mercenaries and an empty treasury. No infant had come into the world less prepared than this new nation of Texas.

  "We're Americans," Houston said, as if that explained everything. Even as he spoke, though, it sounded foolish to him.

  "And we are Mexicans," Almonte shrugged. "The difference is that we have grown tired of illusions. But you North Americans, somehow you manage to go on believing in your flags and independence and martyrdom. You believe in your own propaganda. I can see already how your people will declare that this battle was a great miracle. And that, General Houston, is your victory. You have won over history. You have defeated reality itself. Texas is yours."

  Houston regretted having to spoil the Mexican's grand gesture, but a prosaic answer was the brick he needed. Everything else could be built upon that. "Will you order the withdrawal?" Houston asked.

  Almonte glanced at his chimerical president, adrift in his private memories, and sighed. "Yes," he said.

  It was done.

  Texas.

  Houston gaped up at the constellations. This place was his now. It was a special moment, a triumphant moment. He felt the serpentine roots against his back. He willed them to bind him to this land, now and forever.

  Instead the roots pushed at him. They stood hard and held him at a distance. He could as well have been in Timbuktu or meandering in the upper Rockies. Even now the land was like an ocean to him. He might as well have been a mariner for all the belonging he felt. All through his life it had been this way.

  No sooner would he arrive than he was gone again. And he wasn't alone. Already he'd heard some of these men talking about going after Santa Fe and even California and a place called Nicaragua. In their minds they had already gone ahead. For himself, he wanted it to be different this time. But he didn't know how.

  Suddenly Houston couldn't stand to be here any longer. After so much reckless momentum, the river sounded too slow and the Mexican general's voice seemed infinitely long, a memory without end. It was almost as if Santa Anna's imprisonment were his own, as if they were now chained together by their agreement and were bound together for the rest of time. No, he couldn't stay here one instant longer. He had to escape from this dungeon of shadows.

  "I'll leave you now," he said. "Mr. Bryan will get ink and pen and paper so that the general may draft his order of withdrawal. I'll have it carried to your army posthaste at the crack of dawn."

  Almonte had retreated to silence.

  Houston struggled against the slick roots. But now that he wanted to leave, they clutched at him. His hand slipped and he ended up deeper in the woody limbs. His leg hurt all the way into his spine and lungs. He grated his teeth and tried again.

  Bryan came over and fumbled with Houston's armpit. In the darkness it was hard to make out how badly the general was knotted in among the roots. "Go fetch a light," Bryan told Tad. Then the chains rattled and Houston felt another set of hands at his elbow. It was Santa Anna. "Ah, mi hermano" the monster whispered with concern. My brother.

  / am lost, Houston thought. Then the torchlight was bathing them and Houston was lifted to his feet. Bryan brought the horse close. Houston mounted, his leg bundled like a leper's claw. He looked down at the boy holding the pine knot.

  "Stay here with Mr. Bryan," Houston said to the boy.

  "I'll go with you," Tad said.

  "No. Someone has to watch over our two prisoners. You're sober, they're not." Houston pointed his chin at the guards. "I need a man I can trust here. This is the future of Texas you're guarding."

  The boy looked dubious, but he didn't talk back. Houston leaned in the saddle. He took the torch. It crackled and the

  horse shook the sparks off her neck. "And while you're at it," Houston said to the boy, "water and feed General Santa Anna and Colonel Almonte. Take what you need from those guards. Tell them I said so."

  "I will," the boy said.

  Houston nudged the animal with his left heel, just enough to get her in motion. Ever so slowly she started for the main camp, winding between the trees. He could feel the weariness in her plod. Smith must have ridden her far that day. The woods darkened. Houston twisted around to see Santa Anna one last time, but the little cup of light had been swallowed up.

  A branch reached out and scratched against Houston's cheek. He ducked it. A moment later the horse brushed against a tree, tangling his good leg. Houston kicked it away.

  Somehow the woods were growing denser and darker. He looked for camp to orient himself. It was more distant than it ought to have been and yet its brilliance blinded him. The men must have dragged half the forest into their fires.

  Ye are the light of the world, Houston could practically hear Old Hickory reading the night prayer. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. But what was this city they were building? What had they gained, and at what loss? And could he ever hope to live in it? It seemed fitting their great triumph should be blazing away, not on a hill, but in the deepest swamps.

  Houston looked away and the darkness was inviting. He'd been surrounded by men and their violent intrigues for too long. Solitude and peace were almost forgotten things. The night air tugged at him. It was cool and liberating and quiet. / could ride away and never be missed. It was a romantic notion. But Houston was known to obey such things. Since childhood he had always taken sanctuary in darkness and Indian tribes and finally liquor and the sweet opium. For all their bold talk his Anglo-Saxons didn't like to venture much beyond the penumbra, and that was a blessing because it took just one step beyond the light and he could be alone.

  The horse scraped against another bristle of twigs, this time snaring Houston's torch. He pulled and orange sparks showered to the ground. The flame waned. The darkness swelled, a little bit dangerous, a little bit seductive. The thought came to him, Why return to their crucible of guilt? He listened and heard the distant howl of wolves. They called to him.

  Houston dumped his torch into the damp grass. The light vanished. It was that simple. He was alone.

  He turned the horse away from camp, away from the river, away from man. A Gulf breeze was blowing ever so gently, bringing the smell of rot with it. But Houston found it perfectly natural that destiny or desire or whatever this was would call to him in the wind. Houston pawed at the invisible branches and twigs reaching out to scratch and claw him. There was no way to protect his ankle, though. Once, then twice, it scraped against the trees. Smith's horse was reluctant at first, both tired and hungry. But Houston was insistent.

  Abruptly they broke from the woods and the savannah opened magically beneath the full moon. It was beautiful out here. The grass was a plain of silver filleted with shadows. It seemed to stretch forever. Houston heeled the horse with his left boot. He rode south. The breeze was drawing him onto the battlefield, of course, but that was all right. There would be peace among the dead. They would leave him alone out here, at least until dawn, and maybe by then he would have decided some things. The further he rode, the righter it felt.

  Animals abounded, a surprise since Houston had figured the field would be largely still and lifeless. It was alive with night creatures skittering through the grass. Wolves yipped and barked. Houston
could even hear the snapping of their teeth as they fought over meat. Here and there owls jumped up from their feast and blotted the moon with their wings.

  As he mounted the ridgeline overlooking the Mexican camp, the stink blasted him in a wave of corruption. Dead, his enemy were putting up a better defense than they had in life. Houston wished for the torch. His elation at being free of the army was quickly eroding into childlike fear. Maybe he'd gone far enough.

  Suddenly it seemed unwise to go any deeper into this open field of corpses. Ghosts aside—and it was impossible not to believe in them on a night like this—his dream spirit was at large out here. Whether she was a ghost herself, or a muse, or just his own memory in ricochet, Houston sensed danger. Over his shoulder the northern horizon glowed with the American fires. He started to rein around. But once more his name seemed to respirate in the breeze.

  Samuel. It was the wolves, of course, or the wings of night

  birds. The breeze rushed in again, and with it the possibility of discovery. The grasses bent and shifted under its breath. It wicked the fever heat from his forehead. The moonlight washed him. He felt drawn on. There was no resisting this.

  As he rode on, the horse's hooves snapped a wet twig, then another. The gleaming white sticks lay among the grasses and Houston tried to think how willow switches—what else could be so white?—could have been blown so far inland. He was still a hundred yards from the Mexican breastworks. Then he saw an uneaten foot at the tip of one stick and realized these were human bones. The animals had scattered the remains everywhere. It was a ghastly sight. Houston found it hard to believe a human being could be rendered to sticks and rags and shadow so quickly.

  He urged the mare forward. Under the moonlight the shattered breastworks looked like the long broken backbone of a whale. Houston guided his horse through the wreckage and entered camp. The only tents remaining were so shot up and burned that no one wanted their cloth, even for scraps. A big gray wolf loped past with a rib cage in its jaws. The horse shied sideways. Houston wished for his brace of pistols, then tried to remember if those had been stolen, too. At any rate, all he had was his whittling knife.

  Smith's mare stayed spooky, her ears perked. She lifted her legs high and fancy, ready to bolt. Houston could feel her loathing in her neck muscles. They meandered through what was left of the camp, traversing bald patches of earth where the grass had lit on fire, circling piles of broken boxes and kegs and ruptured tents. The dead lay everywhere. Their hands clawed at the moonlight. Their empty sockets stared up at Houston. The breeze played with his hair, cooled his sweaty trembling.

  Houston didn't know what to look for, which direction to take, how to navigate this geography of ghosts. He just rode on and on, slowly turning here and there, accepting the horrible sights as part of his patrimony. Between him and Santa Anna, Texas had gained a dark underworld to go with its golden sunshine.

  It occurred to him that he might search for the body of the Mexican woman. Every other man in his army had visited her. Now was his turn to be her pilgrim. He would see what she had to say to him. Houston set to tracking her.

  It was an impossible hunt, one without landmarks. She had been sabered among the grasses, that's all he knew. Any pathway of footprints that led to her body would be overlaid with a hundred other pathways. The field was crisscrossed with purposes. Besides that the animals had probably dispersed her parts across the acres and miles.

  Reason told him he could never hope to find her. But if reason were his rule, he'd never have come to Texas in the first place. He searched on. Leaning right, then left in the saddle, Houston rambled through the savannah. He kept out of the trees. Even if she was in there, he couldn't have seen her without a torch. Moonlight was his only hope.

  After a time Houston suspected he might be tracking himself in the grasses. Certainly the dead served as no landmark. Stripped of clothing and flesh, they were anonymous, all the same. However varied they had been in life, in death they only repeated themselves.

  Houston's leg burned with pain. He felt lightheaded and thirsty. It seemed like months since he had eaten more than bits off a corncob and he was famished. And it was hard to imagine how one more pile of bones could speak to him any more clearly than all the rest. But he kept on.

  He made another pass through the camp, then curled outward behind the camp, taking the Mexicans' line of retreat toward the bayou lake. There were far more bodies along this corridor, far more scavengers. Wolves and coyotes and birds scarcely lifted from their feeding as he rode by. He stayed away from the water's edge. The trees and brush were thick with shadows, and he could hear the alligators bellowing and stirring the water. The woman wouldn't have been killed so close to the water anyway, otherwise the soldiers would have mentioned the lake as a landmark. Also the reptiles would have dragged her off the first day. Houston doubled back, working laterally.

  In that way he found her. It could only have been her. They had put her under a little mound of earth and rocks with a cross of tied wood. There was no name on the cross, and Houston couldn't be sure this solitary grave contained her. But one of his men had taken the lady's glove from the staff of their liberty flag and bound it to the cross with twine. The white fingers hung delicately. Men had laid flowers here.

  Houston sat in the saddle, shocked.

  His barbarians had buried her the way they would a wife or a sister or a daughter. The grass lay tramped flat by hundreds of pairs of feet. This was no ordinary grave.

  On a whim he lifted his bad leg over the horn and turned belly down to slide from the saddle. The instant he touched earth, Houston realized this was a mistake. He was weak as a baby, and climbing back into the saddle was going to cost him a lot of pain. He was down now, though, and decided to get his look.

  Bits of metal glittered on the grave. Houston bent close and saw they were lockets and a few coins, both American dollars and Mexican pesos and cut-up quarters of each. Slips of folded paper stuck out from splits in the wood. Ever so gingerly Houston knelt on the soft turf and reached for the cross. He plucked one of the pieces of paper loose and unfolded it. Inside was a poem. It was impossible to make out the words by moonlight, but the form was clear, and so was the intent. The soldiers were singing to her.

  Who were these men? In the form of Colonel Forbes, they had killed her and it made no sense that one more death should touch them so. But at least they were touched. Houston let go of the poem and it fluttered off in the breeze.

  He listened for her voice. He put his hand on the earthen hump. Behind him the mare reached for some grass and started chewing. Vve crossed the world to find you, Houston thought. Vve conquered it. I'm here. Now speak. But she said nothing.

  Off to the side something stirred in the grass. It was large, judging by the noise. Houston glanced up in time to see a sizable furrow seal together again in the grass. It could only be a wolf.

  His first concern was the mare. Without her, he was lost. He was unarmed and no one knew where he was. He could die among the dead. The animals would eat him to bone and he would disappear. He would be forgotten.

  The horse had pricked her ears up and she was following the sound. Slowly so that she wouldn't startle, Houston stood on one leg and reached for the dangling reins. He almost got them, too. But the grasses whipped open. Houston caught a glimpse of some lank white animal. At the same instant, the mare reared and screamed. Her hooves missed Houston's head by an inch and he stepped back, twisting his bad ankle. He fell to the ground, screaming. Then she was off, kicking right and

  left at the ghosts. She matched his scream, and the last he saw of her was a silhouette along the luminous north horizon.

  After a few minutes Houston pulled himself over to the grave where he lay exhausted. Even in pain he was embarrassed by his situation. He couldn't walk, and crawling was out of the question. Pulling himself through the remains would be more than he could stomach, and the wolves would get him before he got a hundred yards.

  "Goddamn i
t," Houston swore at himself. He'd survived battles and a duel and outlasted a coup by his own officers and outsmarted an emperor. He'd faced bullets and malice and towering storms. He was the commanding general of a republic, for God's sake. And now, because of a sentimental urge, he faced getting eaten by a wilderness of his own making.

  Houston set his back against the grave mound. He fished out his clasp knife and got the blade locked open, and tried holding it one way for sticking and jabbing, then the other way, underhanded, for ripping. Knife fighting had never been an interest of his. Unable to decide which was the superior position for impaling a wolf, he stuck the knife into the dirt beside his hip and cast around for other possible weapons. The only things close at hand were rocks from the mound, and he piled a few within easy reach. That was it. Houston s last stand, he snorted, my own private Alamo. It wasn't going to be much of a fight.

  For a long while he just waited. Clouds drifted in from the Gulf, menacing his moonlight with temporary feints. His ankle was hurting worse now and his leg felt hot to the touch right through the homespun pants. The limb was infected and he half wished the wolves would take just those couple feet of spoiled meat for their meal, say from the thigh down.

  When the wolf didn't reappear, Houston began to relax. With his back against the grave, he listened to every motion and whisper in the air, alive to the sounds. But the night had become as still and quiet as the dead woman under his back. Cloud shadows streamed over him, only to pass. He located a few of his favorite constellations in the gaps. He shivered. He sweated. He tried to remember snatches of the Iliad to stay awake. Finally, deciding the mare had kicked the animal senseless or scared it off, he let the fever have him. That was when it chose to attack.