They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  There was only the flicker of fire in the lenses of his glasses.

  “It did clear things up. What you’re trying to do, how you feel about these men. I expect it’s been hell for you since Columbus. Evidently what happened was the kind of thing you could never speak of to a man. You could tell me now.”

  He kept his eyes on Chawk. From time to time the non-com’s head sank, then reared.

  “It’s like the cure the gente have for snakebite,” she said. “Cut and draw, then put a little gunpowder in the wound and set fire to it.”

  Thorn was not conscious of beginning, nor of how, his tongue being swollen, his speech was slurred. His heart had been so long locked that what he had kept in it had changed meaning. It seemed not his. His account was almost matter-of-fact. He omitted nothing. Bachelor quarters for himself and Lieutenant Kavanaugh of H Troop had been a small adobe house in the mesquite at the edge of town. Hearing horses outside they had dressed quickly, taken pistols and gone into the pitch dark to find themselves separated by mounted men. At that moment firing commenced. On the run to reach regimental headquarters Thorn had instead crawled into a cement culvert under the El Paso and Southwestern Railway line which bisected the town. Here he had lain for two hours, face down, as the fight went on about him, fire from Machine-Gun Troop spraying over him into the light of the burning Commercial Hotel where the Mexicans were bunched up. He had been found at dawn by Lieutenant Treat of C Troop. He was confined to quarters. Charges were not immediately preferred because the next week had been one of confusion, during which the Punitive Expedition was organized, and because Colonel Rogers’s inquiries turned up the fact that in the chaos of the Villista raid only Lieutenant Treat had been witness to the dereliction. No other officers had noticed, and most important, no enlisted men. Rogers had given Thorn the task of writing, as partial punishment, a Congressional Medal of Honor for Sergeant Boice which, when completed, the Colonel took with him to Fort Bliss. In conference with General Pershing, also a friend of Thorn’s father, it was decided on the basis of previous record and the likelihood of keeping talk at a minimum to let sleeping dogs lie. Relieved as Executive Officer, Thorn was designated Awards Officer for the Expedition. If the supreme irony of the appointment had occurred to the Commanding General or to Colonel Rogers, neither man had mentioned it. But that his conduct could be buried had been a hope forlorn, of course, and although taking the field had slowed the process, once the junior officers had hold of it he was lost. If it had not been Trubee it would have been someone else, somewhere, and soon.

  She listened intently.

  “What will happen?”

  “When?”

  “When we reach your base. If we do. And if Trubee talks.”

  “It will spread and pressure will build up and they will have to wash the dirty linen.”

  “What will that mean to you?”

  “Resignation, at the least. Dishonorably. Loss of retirement privileges. I am forty.”

  She frowned. “He seemed to give you a choice. That is, if you would forget the decorations and trying to bulldog me.”

  “He and Chawk do not want the Medal. Neither does Lieutenant Fowler.”

  “What?”

  “They have told me.”

  “Would it be possible, not to write them?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well?”

  “I have been in one culvert.”

  She stared at him, then resuming her questions with male directness, began at the same time, incongruously, to work with her hair. What followed was strangely like, yet the opposite of, his interviews with the men.

  “What did you think during the fight?”

  “Nothing. I was afraid.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “I have been two men. One cannot stand to live in the same skin with the other.”

  “Can you explain what you did, even to yourself?”

  “No. I have no excuse.” He added that his only bad luck had been not making the discovery long before. A civilian might end his days without arriving at any total of his courage, but not a soldier. Yet that was how it had been. “In Cuba, at Santiago, I was an aide to General Shafter, another friend of my father’s. Before I could see any action in the Philippines the last of the Moros surrendered. The rest has been garrison.”

  If he did not talk he would fall asleep sitting. He rubbed the whiskers on his chin against the grain until the pain roused him. At the other fire Chawk had risen to pace back and forth.

  “A soldier has just three possibilities,” he said. “He can run away, he can do his duty, or he can perform above and beyond it. A civilian can change, do all three at different times. Not a soldier. A few seconds out of his life stamp him forever. But for either of them, I am sure the worst knowledge any man may have is that he is a coward. I do not believe cowardice is hereditary. But I have thanked God I do not have a son.”

  Adelaide Geary’s hair was rich as the mane of a great horse. She coiled it at the back of her head, took several pins from a jacket pocket and fastened the coil.

  “I found out about myself eight years ago,” she said. “I was no spoiled child. To be blunt, I was a mean, low, cowardly bitch. Ojos was my culvert and I hid in it. Then I discovered it was the place I had been hunting all my life. I was needed by the people. Generations ago the Spaniards made serfs of them and later the Apaches butchered them. Then for a hundred years they were owned body and soul by whatever general happened to be top dog in the region. I cared for them and protected them and gave them dignity. I lived for them. Looked at one way, I suppose it was a means of atoning, which must be behind what you are doing for these men.’’

  “It is not,” he said. “This has to be for them, not for me, or it signifies nothing.”

  “You still think they deserve. . . ”

  “They do, they do.”

  She slapped her leg impatiently. “Here we go again. I said last night you must be blind, but it’s not that. You’re still groveling in that culvert, unable or afraid to see out of it. Heroes, are they? Saints living in the desert on beans and visions? Oh my God, Thorn.” She shook her head. “They try to rape me and blackmail you. It’s a wonder they haven’t shot you by now. If I had offered any one of them what I offered you to let me go, you know what his answer would have been. No, Thorn, they are only men, and damn poor specimens at that. If they are heroes, I’m the Virgin Mary. If they are the rock of the world, it’s only because you have to have something to lean on. I’m resigned to being taken in, though the fact is you are more your own prisoner than I am. But if I were you I’d tell these Galahads to go look for the grail in hell and find their own way.”

  He did not appear to hear. Finally he said: “I have less right than any man on earth to judge them.”

  “Or to judge yourself either,” she said.

  He did not understand.

  “They are all the things you say,” he admitted slowly. “They are human beings. But they are more. They have a thing in them that is a miracle and a mystery. It redeems them. I have tried to find out what it is, whether they were born to it or how it came to be. They don’t know themselves. But they have this thing in them. We don’t. I have to save it.”

  She looked at him, then at the sleeping Hetherington, then towards the huge man at the other fire.

  “You really believe this.”

  He nodded dumbly.

  “If you do. . . .” She stopped, firmed her voice. “If you do, Thorn, you may be worth all of them.”

  She stood. “I have to turn in. Another day like this and I’ll be a litter case. So will you if you don’t spare yourself. Your sergeant is still up, let him stand guard.”

  “I will.”

  She started away, turned. “I didn’t think. Stupid tired. You don’t dare post him.”

  He did not answer.

  “Of course. Well, let Mr. West Point take a turn.”

  “I can do that,” he lied.

  Satisfied, she went t
o her blankets. She had not seen that he wore two guns.

  Chawk was still pacing to keep awake, looking now and then down the plateau at the officer.

  Thorn made himself rise. He stared at his watch. Almost 23.00 hours. Between four and five hours more.

  His body seemed not flesh and blood but a structure of wants and aches and pains. He thirsted. His stomach clenched with hunger. The underside of his tongue, where he had held the pebble, was raw. His eyes were sore, and the lining of his nostrils, and the bridge of his nose. The skin of his face and hands crawled with burn. His feet were so swollen that if he took off his boots he might be unable to force them on again. On the outsides of both legs, under the holsters, embedded barbs of the agrito stung and caused swelling which would head and fester.

  ‘I am my own crippled child.’

  He yearned to tear off shirt and breeches and run in the cool night air and shout and with both guns shoot up the target stars.

  Chawk watching and waiting maddened him. To sleep he had only to walk to the other fire and in self-defense, of his life perhaps, surely of his sanity, send one bullet slamming through the man.

  As he approached, the non-com put hands on hips. “Got a Officers Only sign on ‘er crotch, has she, Major? You ain’t in no shape to stud, though. Yer all petered out. Not me. I might be the strongest man in this Army, you know that? You honest think you can wait me out?”

  Thorn drew the forty-five. The good heft of it nerved him.

  “Why, you wouldn’ gun me, Major. Be a mighty sinful thing to do, kill a hero.”

  Thorn slipped the safety.

  Chapter Eleven

  “STOP! Don’t drink! I order you not to drink!”

  It was like fanning a stampede. Walking ahead, Trubee had sighted the waterhole and taken out on the run, and the others let down the litter so wildly that Thorn had all he could do to prevent Hetherington’s head from hitting rock. Now he trotted forward still shouting, to find them faces down, heads almost underwater. The hole was small and stagnant. There were no game tracks at its edges. He cupped a hand and tasted the water. It was extremely alkaline. He looked at the men swilling and hatting water over their heads and inside their collars and went back to meet Adelaide Geary.

  “I couldn’t stop them short of shooting. It’s very alkaline.”

  “They’ll pay for it.”

  “How?”

  It was then she noticed the two guns.

  “You lied. You didn’t change off with Custer last night. Why?”

  He told her.

  “So you had no sleep. Why didn’t you give me a gun?”

  “You are a prisoner.’’

  “Oh my God.” She swept up her hat-brim. “And you think you can outwait that pug-ugly? You can’t, Thorn, you’re dead on your feet. Three on one—do you mind my asking what the hell you intend to do?”

  “Take us to base.”

  For an instant she was her old self, her head angry high, her eyes changing from sea-blue to grey as grey as the dawn around them.

  “Then give me a gun now, let me help.”

  ‘‘No.’’

  “You poor brass-head mule!”

  He turned away and going to the hole filled two of the canteens. The water would do for Hetherington’s fever; the little pure left in the third canteen he would save for quinine. When he had sluiced his own face and head he got the bearers going.

  The early light played no tricks. The low hills were close, no more than two to four miles off, and the cross-hatching of the basin appeared to end before that. Thorn kept them at it steadily on the strength of the water and in an hour’s time they moved up out of the last arroyo, left the rust and grey and mica and granite and limestone and tramped through sandy waste. Surely the hills lifted before them. Scaling the tops of the hills, the mounting sun streaked down their near and barren sides.

  They saw the Tex-Mex at a distance, the rails gleaming and the white roadbed, saw it in silence.

  By mid-morning they put the litter down beside it. One or two touched the rails, another kicked idly at a cross-tie, others looked up and down as far as the terrain let them. Circling this, the eastern lip of the basin, the Tex-Mex angled gradually northwest and finally disappeared among the hill groins. To each the meaning of the railroad was different, but to each touching the iron and wood, that meaning became more real, more urgent.

  “I sign up for the Army to be shet of the railroad,” Chawk mused aloud, “an’ I’ll be Gaw-damn, here I am.”

  “How far to base now, Major?” Renziehausen asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s down ta tha other end?” Trubee asked.

  “Chihuahua City.”

  Trubee sat on a rail. “Whyn’t we be demmacratic, Majer? Them that wants to go south an’ back ta regiment can an’ them that wants ta go north an’ be heroes or get their ass kicked outa tha Army can do that.”

  “Let’s go,” Thorn said.

  “Which way you goin’, Majer?”

  They found their ordeal far from over. The elation of the water soon wore off. They passed other holes, each stagnant and alkaline. They could not march on the railroad due to the awkward spacing of the ties while the bed of crushed stone on either side hurt their feet and piles of small boulders, placed at regular intervals for repair purposes, barred their way. They marched a rod or so from the line. Sun soon tortured them. So great had been the cost of crossing the basin that a mile this day was the equivalent in effort of five the day before.

  They halted at one point to examine what revolution had wrought. To deny the use of trackage to the other, Villa or the Federals—it was impossible to say which—had used a backing locomotive and chains to rip ties out of the bed for nearly a hundred yards, then twisted the rails, heaped ties and rails together and set fire to the tangle.

  They put the basin behind them and entered the hills. Backed by the sun the hills resembled pieces of crude earthenware, bowls and conical jars, with here and there a pattern of encino, scrub oak and cedar, and along their contours the line of the Tex—Mex wound in slow ascent, the bearers panting under their burden. The country reminded Thorn of that around Guerrero where he had found Hetherington and they had camped after the dust storm in the lee of a butte.

  Now the water they had drunk took its toll. A man would stop, trying to double up, drop his corner of the litter and hobble bent over behind the nearest tree growth in agony. The effect of the alkali was diuretic and laxative. Waiting, the party could hear him groan, heard the foul and tearing sounds as his bowels opened. Often no cover was at hand and the stricken man was forced to strip down his breeches and squat beast-like in the open while the others turned their heads. One by one, again and again, often by twos, Lieutenant Fowler, Trubee, Chawk and Renziehausen were suddenly griped, tried to relieve themselves, and returned to the detail drawn and weakened. Even Chawk was sapped. Pace snailed. They did not make a mile an hour.

  Language became as vile as necessity. Thorn ordered the woman, who followed him closely, to fall back so that she would not hear and to remain at a distance from him during the stops so that the men would have less excuse for resentment.

  Hetherington’s fever smouldered. Thorn started him on quinine and resorted once more to wetting the shirt and tenting it over the youth’s face. Towards noon his voice intoned solemnly above them: “‘Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength upon thy holy habitation. . . Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, 0 Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, 0 Lord, which thy hands have established.’”

  With a thud Trubee dropped his corner of the litter. As the others let down their ends he crouched over Hetherington.

  “Shut yer goddam preachin’! Die, goddam you, you better die!” he shouted at the damp shirt, as though the unconscious youth could hear. “I ain’t carryin’ you another foot so you die an’ d
o it quick!”

  He straightened up and waved his arms. His eyes popped out of what had been a face, but was now so sunburned that the eruptions on it had festered into a single flaming pimple.

  “I won’t carry ‘im no farther, hear me, Majer! He’s gonna die anyways. You can leave ‘im or tote ‘im but I’m done—I ain’t killin’ myself!”

  Weaving to the tracks he sat down on a rail and began to blubber. “I’m too old for tha field—nothin’ to eat an’ my insides drawed inside out! I need me some good water more’n that one does, I tell you!” Tears trickled from his eyes. “We’re all gonna die in this God-fergot country an’ the buzzards’ll pick us clean an’ they’ll say to our skeleytons what heroes we was!”

  Taken unawares, his reflexes slowed, Thorn had stopped close to the others. He backed off. They were looking from Trubee to him, uncertain what they should do. He drew a pistol, thumbed the safety.

  “Trubee, on the litter. That’s an order.”

  “You ain’t had that alk-li goin’ through you!” Trubee wailed.

  Chawk hawked and spat. “He done his jobs at Columbus. He don’t have nothin’ to shit with.”

  “We’re going on,” Thorn said. “We’ve made the railroad and that’s the last lap. Base may be on the other side of any of these hills.”

  Lieutenant Fowler replaced the shirt. He had been studying Hetherington’s condition.

  “He must be dying. If it’s a matter of five of us surviving I don’t think we have any choice. I know I can’t carry him much longer. If we are close to base why can’t we leave him and send a detail back after him?”

  Thorn pretended not to hear.

  “Or don’t you really know how close?” Fowler demanded.

  “Make up your mind, Trubee,” Thorn said sharply. “Off your tail or I will wing you.”

  “You shoot me an’ my kids won’t have no father!” Trubee cried.

  “Up,” Thorn said. He raised the .45.

  No one believed he would fire.

  The gun slammed, rocking them. The slug spattered crushed stone over Trubee and with a whang ricocheted off the iron rail and yelled away in bright air. For seconds the rail sang.