by Drew McGunn
***
The next morning, the church doors were thrown open, slamming against the walls, waking Sergeant Mejia as the noise echoed in the church’s close confines. He climbed to his feet as he watched the young Mexican army officer, in command of the Reynosa garrison, walk through the doors, accompanied by a squad of soldados. In heavily accented English, he said, “You all have fifteen minutes to prepare. I’ve been ordered to send you on to Tampico, and from there to Veracruz.” The officer turned sharply about and strode out the church, leaving the squad behind.
Mejia eyed the soldados warily, uncertain what to make of the announcement. Perhaps General Woll had finally gotten around to getting them ready to ship to the United States. If that were true, what did it mean was happening in Texas? Had the French General in the pay of Mexico defeated Johnston’s men at the Alamo? With so many unknowns rattling around in his mind, Mejia grabbed the one positive thought. It would be good to see the sun overhead. Holding on to that thought, he turned to helping his men prepare to leave the church’s cramped quarters.
As the emaciated Texians emerged from the church, they squinted as the April morning sunlight filled the town’s plaza, where they were forced to line up. The town’s entire garrison was assembled in the plaza, surrounding the prisoners.
The young lieutenant sat on a chestnut mare, wearing a stern countenance, as the men were lined up in a column of twos. As they were herded out of the plaza and onto a road leading south, the soldados from the Reynosa garrison marched on both sides of the prisoners. Bayonet-tipped muskets were slung over their shoulders, as they set a demanding pace. The road south was nothing more than a hard-packed wagon trail, and the Texians struggled to keep up with their guards.
As best as he was able, Sergeant Mejia tried to encourage his fellow soldiers to maintain the grueling pace. He worried his men would be dead on their feet when they arrived at wherever the Mexicans intended to stay for the night. That thought led to another. The soldados escorting them carried no backpacks. If they were sending him and his men to Tampico, why were they not carrying packs?
After a little more than an hour’s march, the column stopped. He helped the soldier who’d been beside him to the ground. The other man was still recovering from his wounds. Mejia looked around and found the young officer at the back of the column, deep in conversation with an older sergeant. He felt a sense of alarm growing within. He had expected the soldados to push them along the road with few breaks. When the young officer finished talking to his NCO, instead of relaxing, the soldados became tenser. Every warning bell in Mejia’s head was sounding off, when the guards to the prisoners’ left crossed over the road, joining their compatriots to the right of Mejia’s men.
With little warning, the entire force of soldados came together in a single line and raised their bayoneted muskets to their shoulders.
Too late, everything fell into place. How could he have been so stupid? Mejia screamed out, “Run, boys! They’re going to kill us!”
As the exhausted Texians reacted to his warning, forty muskets fired into the mass of men at point-blank range. Mejia involuntarily ducked when he felt a bullet zoom by his head. He crouched down and saw most of his company fall to the ground, dead or wounded. The soldados, bayonets fixed to their weapons, leveled their muskets, and started in among his men. To the open side of the road, Mejia sprinted, trying to ignore the stitch of pain in his leg, but each time his left foot pounded into the soil, he winced. He dodged a prickly pear cactus and stepped around a thorn bush. He chanced a look behind and saw the soldados bayoneting men on the road. A couple other Texians, to his right and left were, like him, trying to flee into the desert.
Thinking there was strength in numbers, Mejia angled to his left, with the idea of connecting with his nearest compatriot in a few hundred yards. Behind him, he heard a scattering of musket shots and saw a bullet kick up dust a few feet to his front. But the man he was veering toward stumbled and fell, a red mist exploded from where the bullet slammed into his back.
Too breathless to swear at the soldados behind him, Mejia renewed his focus on putting one foot in front of the other as fast as he could flee the danger behind him.
Five minutes or ten, he wasn’t sure, but with his heart thundering in his chest, Mejia slowed to a walk for a few seconds then stopped. His left leg spasmed in pain. Even though largely healed, the running had taken a toll on his leg. He turned and looked behind him. There was no one he could see in pursuit. He figured he must have put at least a mile between him and the massacre back on the road. Thinking about all his companions lying dead on that dusty road brought tears unbidden to his eyes. They ran into his beard. Those men back there had been his responsibility and he had failed them. It would have been better for them to have died at their post back on the Rio Grande than to die at the hand of Mexican treachery.
The tears continued, even as his breathing returned to normal. He had to escape and tell people back in Texas what had happened, he owed it to his companions. His best guess was that the river was only a few miles away. He had to hurry. Surely the garrison commander knew that if he made good his escape, word of the massacre would travel far. With each step north, he knew that even the river wouldn’t provide the safety he needed.
***
The haze of gunpowder was gone before Lieutenant Estevan Alameda dismounted, a gentle southerly breeze seemed eager to rid the air of the acrid smell of smoke. But the cloying smell of blood lingered, resisting the wind’s effort to cleanse the air.
A Texian, with a bullet hole in his chest, stared with vacant eyes at him as he stepped amid the carnage along the road. Alameda jerked away from those accusing eyes, as his stomach threatened to disgorge his breakfast. This was the first time he’d witnessed death since graduating from the Colegio Militar. This was as far removed from the glorious and heroic images of war as he could imagine. He swallowed, trying to keep the contents in his stomach down. He had grown up imagining war was glorious cavalry charges, sweeping Mexico’s enemies aside and riding to victory, trampling over the enemy’s flag. But there was no glory in watching helpless men being slaughtered. Especially those who had honorably surrendered. No, there was no glory in this.
His men cleared the dead from the road, dragging them into the ditch. His ranking non-commissioned officer, Eduardo Hernandez appeared from the other side of the road, carrying a couple of ragged brown jackets. He cast a look at the bodies along the roadside. As a veteran of Santa Anna’s earlier campaigns, crushing rebellions across northern Mexico, he took it in stride. He’d seen this before. In place of a salute, he offered the jackets to the young lieutenant, “Sir, we’ve accounted for all the rebels except one. We killed two who attempted to escape, but I’m pretty sure, their sergeant, the Tejano, escaped.”
Alameda was sick. His eyes kept returning to the long line of bodies beside the road. This wasn’t war. But he held his tongue, certain his sergeant wouldn’t understand. Instead, he pointed toward the dead bodies, “Perhaps we should send a few men back into town and fetch some of the men to help us bury them.”
Sergeant Hernandez eyed him circumspectly. “It’s your call, sir. But if I may, perhaps I should have the boys drag them further into the field. They can build a pyre and burn the bodies. I’m sure that we’ll capture our missing Tejano, but the fewer folks who know of today’s actions, the better it might go, if General Woll isn’t successful.”
The lieutenant wanted to scream. It wasn’t enough that they had murdered these men, now it was necessary to burn the evidence and find and silence the one who escaped. He shook his head, this certainly wasn’t what he signed up for. He turned his back on the sergeant and swung in the saddle. “As you say, Sergeant Hernandez. Assign the corporals to oversee the absolution of our sin here and take a couple of men with you and find that Tejano. Don’t let him get away.”
Chapter 20
6th of April 1842
Water dripped from his threadbare, faded jacket as he crouched
behind a cypress tree. He was soaked, water puddling at his feet, but at least he was on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. His last half hour on the Mexican side of the river, he felt as though he was not alone. Now, as he gazed back across the river, he thought he saw flashes of red and blue moving among the Montezuma cypress growing along the southern bank. Sergeant Julio Mejia remained hidden behind the large native tree when he saw a soldado approach the shoreline.
It was the sergeant from the Reynosa garrison. He walked along the bank of the water, eyes riveted to the ground, evidently looking for where Mejia had entered the river. While he walked along the edge of the river, a couple more men appeared alongside, and joined him in his search for any evidence Mejia may have left as to where he crossed the river.
The Tejano cast a fleeting look at a large branch lying on the shoreline less than a dozen yards away. It had only washed up a little while earlier, after Mejia had pushed it into the water up river and used it to swim across. It was possible, if the Mexicans continued on their current path for a few hundred more yards, they would find where he’d dragged the large cypress branch into the water. As they moved away, he rose from his hiding place and began following the river, heading east, toward his goal more than sixty miles away, Fort Brown, on the mouth of the Rio Grande.
He hurried his pace as much as he dared, as the sun began to set behind him. With no food, and only the questionable water source of the river to quench his thirst, it was best to keep moving as late into the evening as possible. He stepped around a copse of mesquite trees and looked behind him. There was every possibility he was being followed. He stepped up his pace and kept walking long after the sun had fled the sky.
***
A boot slid through the grass only a few feet away from where Mejia was lying down behind a fallen oak tree. He’d passed through nearly sixty miles of the Rio Grande Valley. Surely the Texian fort was only a mile or two away, and here he was, trapped behind the fallen trunk, listening to the footfalls getting closer.
He briefly closed his eyes, wondering how he had wound up here. It was around sunrise on the second day after the massacre when he determined he wasn’t the only one moving eastward along the shoreline of the river. On several occasions he had turned, looking behind him and saw a flash of metal, and a glimpse of a blue and red uniform.
The weeks in the church-turned-prison had sapped his strength, but he had forced himself to press onward. Everything since his escape would be in vain if he were caught. He owed it to the murdered men of his company, to make it back to Texas and tell people what had happened.
The boot stopped. It was close by. He could smell the stench of sweat on the woolen jacket worn by whomever was on the opposite side of the tree trunk.
Mejia willed himself to be still, taking the smallest breaths as possible, as he attempted to listen to the slightest change. The boots shifted, and grass rustled, but if it was the Mexican sergeant opposite him, he wasn’t moving away enough for him to risk a deeper breath. As his eyes were closed, in his mind, he saw his men lying dead in that dusty road. Their eyes stared at him, accusing.
He had replayed the massacre in his mind repeatedly as he had hurried toward Fort Brown. He should have noticed the Mexicans were without their packs, that it was an execution into which he and his men had been led. Tears came unbidden. It seemed like every time he closed his eyes, the men from Company N accused him, blaming him for their murders.
The leather soles resumed sliding across the grass, as they circled around the small clearing, on the side of which lay the fallen oak tree. It had to be the cagey sergeant. Maybe the other soldados had been sent back to report on their progress. Mejia could only speculate. But he was sure, the one still following him was the persistent non-commissioned officer.
The images in Mejia’s head fled back into the recesses of his mind when he opened his eyes again. This cat and mouse game had to end. He pressed his body more closely against the tree trunk, willing himself to be invisible. His eyes were open, looking into the blue sky, but all he could see were the accusing eyes of his former comrades. Their blood called out to him, as he hid from his pursuer. The boots had gone silent, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t take the voices in his head crying for vengeance any longer.
He sat up and saw over the trunk. It was the Mexican sergeant. His back was turned, at the other side of the clearing. It looked like the man was relieving himself. His musket was propped against a tree within arm’s length of where he stood.
Noiselessly, the Tejano rose to his feet, and stepped over the log. The other man was, for the moment, oblivious to Mejia’s presence behind him.
The voices in his head grew louder, drowning every thought in their rage. He screamed. It was primal, carrying the burden of every man he’d seen murdered, he lunged at the Mexican sergeant.
The other man was half-turned, when Mejia crashed into him, driving him into the wet ground before him. Mejia landed on top of him and hammered him with his fists.
The Mexican sergeant reflexively brought his hands up, blocking some of the blows. Others smashed into his lip, his nose, and eyes. His musket had fallen away when they had crashed to the ground, but he still carried a knife at his belt.
The Tejano’s fists pounded into the other man’s face, as hands fell away, making it easier to land each powerful blow with a meaty thwack. He wasn’t sure what alerted him, but something in the way the Mexican shifted, made him roll back as a wicked blade sliced the air where he’d been just a second before.
The man in the blue and red jacket clambered to his feet, waving the pig-sticker toward Mejia, who backpedaled until his knees bumped against the fallen oak tree.
The Mexican spat in the grass as he crouched low and approached. Mejia edged to his right, along the tree trunk, hoping to maneuver around his wary opponent. But with every sidestep, the Mexican sergeant matched it with his own adjustment.
Separated by no more distance than the height of a man, Mejia watched him heft the blade, as though testing the balance. The Mexican at last broke the silence, “Your situation is hopeless. Surrender and I’ll take you back to Reynosa.”
Mejia couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “I’ve seen your mercy, puta.”
With a snarl, the Mexican sprang forward, driving the knife toward Mejia. The Tejano sprang onto the tree trunk and lashed out with his foot, catching the other man in the face.
The Tejano saw the knife sail past his eyes, as he watched the other man collapse to his knees in surprised pain, blood flowing from his broken nose. Mejia pounced onto the Mexican, knocking him onto his back. He pummeled the Mexican’s face until his knuckles bled. The other man swatted at his hands and tried to dislodge him.
His hands hurt and still the other man attempted to stop the beating. Finally, Mejia wrapped his bloody hands around the Mexican’s throat and as though his life depended upon it, squeezed with all his might, until long after the other man stopped struggling and went limp.
He staggered to his feet and found the knife in the grass and slipped it into his belt. He hadn’t seen any other soldados with the sergeant, and hopefully no one else was following, but he still felt better carrying the knife.
Less than half a mile later, he crossed a well-worn trail leading to the river. In the distance he saw an earthen fort, similar in construction to Fort Moses Austin. Above the rampart flew the Texas flag. Despite his earlier victory over his pursuer, he couldn’t resist a furtive glimpse behind him. A glimmer of a smile crossed his lips. The only one in pursuit was dead. He straightened his jacket and stepped onto the trail leading to the fort. He hoped he cut a soldierly figure as he walked toward the earthen embankment. The last thing he wanted was to be mistaken for a Mexican soldado.
When he was within shouting distance, he saw a blue-jacketed rifleman standing behind the wall, near a wooden gate. The gun was already pointed in his direction when he stopped and waved at the sentry. After a too long wait, Mejia’s nerves were worn, but the guar
d waved for him to come closer. Under his breath, he muttered, “I hope he’s not trying to line up a shot.”
When no more than fifty feet separated him from the fort, the sentry shouted, “That’s far enough there, old boy!” Mejia stopped and assessed the man holding the gun on him. The guard was dressed in the uniform of a Texian Marine. With a thick Irish accent, he continued, “What’s one of General Travis’ men doin’ here? You’re a wee bit too far from home, if I’m not mistaken.”
With his hands open before him, Mejia shrugged and replied, “I’d rather not be here at all, but I was part of Captain Neill’s garrison at Fort Moses Austin. I’m all that’s left of it.”
The guard eyed him for another long moment then said, “You’ll be needin’ to wait there.” He turned and shouted into the fort and a moment later the ramparts were lined with more marines, their rifles now trained on Mejia. A young officer came up next to the guard and Mejia watched the two conversed. The officer pointed toward him and asked, “Who did you say you served under?”
Mejia repeated, “Captain Neill was our commander.” He felt the knife at his waist and was tempted to let his frustration get the better of him. But he left his hands at his side, realizing the officer was only doing his duty, protecting the post.
After that, the Lieutenant waved him to approach the gate. As Mejia advanced, he heard a wooden bar sliding out of place and the gate swung outward. There was a short, open corridor between the gate and the fort’s interior, and several Marines stood along the wall, with their weapons at the ready. His temper was already frayed, and he exclaimed, “Can’t tell the difference between a loyal Texian and a Mexican?”
The guard, still standing above, piped up, “Faith, man, when I was in the old country, I couldn’t tell me own lads from the bloody lobsterbacks. Seems the same could be said of you.”
The first response to come to mind, Mejia dismissed, after all, there were rifles pointed at him. “I might be disposed to tell you what I think of that, if you all would be kind enough to stop pointing those damned things at me.”