In the Rogue Blood

by Blake, J

  A few days later Taylor would issue a general order renaming the place Fort Brown. But for months after, the Mexican Army of the North would be talking of the round the Irishman Riley put in the Yankee officer’s pocket on the Rio Bravo.

  10

  They’d been shelling the fort for a week when late one morning they heard the thumping of distant artillery and spied dust on the horizon to the north and knew the two armies had engaged. They judged the fight to be about ten miles removed and centered near the Palo Alto pond. By late afternoon there was thick white smoke on the sky which they would come to learn was from grassfires ignited by burning powder wads of American artillery. Mexican wounded would burn to death as the fires spread through the chaparral. Riley cursed Arista’s stupidity in having taken only round shot for his guns. “The Yanks are using explosive shell and he’s shooting at them with iron balls. Jesus! Why not throw stones at them for all the good of round shot?” Captain Moreno took him aside and suggested he keep such insubordinate opinions to himself. Yet they soon enough heard of how the Yankees laughed at the solid shot and made a game of sidestepping it as it rolled past and was chased after by the dogs.

  The battlesounds ceased at sunset but the grassfires continued to burn and the northern sky flickered redly through the night. Speculation was rampant in the garrison and wholly uninformed. The fighting resumed at dawn the next day at but half the distance, the crackling of small arms now audible between bursts of artillery. “Moreno believes they be roundabouts a dry riverbed called Resaca de la Palma,” Riley told John and Lucas. “Says the chaparral’s thick as Moses’ beard out there.”

  Dust and smoke rose densely from that direction. And now they heard other sounds mingled with the booming of the field guns and the crack and pop of rifles. Heard the shrill of horses, heard war cries and screams of fury and fear and agony. And now they spied a scattering of lancers riding pell-mell for the river and every man of them clearly desperate for greater speed as they lashed at their mounts and dug rowels into the animals’ bloody flanks and the lathered horses came hard with their eyes white with terror. Behind them came more riders and behind the horsemen came the greater mass of the broken and terrified Mexican infantry running headlong, some with their rifles still in hand, many devoid of all weapons, running as if from the devil himself. Never had John seen fear on such scale as this nor heard such a collective wail of despair. The Mexicans ran wildeyed into the river and some spilled headlong in the shallows and were trampled by those behind and in some places men drowned in less than a foot of water. They splashed frantically for the south bank and some floundered and sank from sight in mid-river and none alongside or behind these drowning comrades thought to save them, caught up in their own frenzy to escape the Yankee demons on their heels. And those demons now hove into sight and came shrieking with bloodlust and ready bayonets and they skewered every fallen Mexican they came upon.

  Thus did Arista’s troops come back from their first full engagement with the Americans. Moreno and Riley had already resumed shelling the fort to hold at bay the troops within and keep them from joining in the slaughter.

  John had cast aside his cane and was working with one of Riley’s gun crews. And even as they fired round after round on Fort Texas across the way they caught each other’s eyes, he and Riley and Lucas Malone, and all three knew the war had truly begun and the dice of their future days were tossed and tumbling.

  Over the next nights Matamoros lay awake amid the moans of the dead and dying, the howls of encroaching wolves. The heat of day hummed with hordes of fat green flies. The walls of Fort Texas and the Matamoros rooftops were crowded with buzzards looking like solemn red-cowled priests attending a mass funeral.

  Burial parties on both sides of the river worked round the clock to put the dead in the ground. But the going was slow and at night the lobos could be heard snapping and growling and tearing at the corpses.

  Reporters traveling with Taylor’s army claimed the wolves preferred to feed on American dead rather than on the degenerate enspiced flesh of the Mexicans.

  Four days later the United States declared war on Mexico.

  11

  Arista’s battered Army of the North abandoned Matamoros and all the sick and wounded and took with them a thousand camp followers and trudged southwest for nearly two hundred punishing miles to the town of Linares. The trek was through treeless brushcountry under a broiling sun that at last gave way to blessed rain which quickly became a two-day downpour that turned the countryside to mud. Wagons mired and animals bogged. They ran out of rations and slaughtered and ate pack animals and discarded the equipment they had borne.

  At Linares they rested and regrouped and awaited further orders from Mexico City. They passed the rest of spring and the first half of summer in training and regaining strength. During this time yet more American deserters found their way to them and signed enlistment contracts and were placed with the new company of foreigners calling themselves the San Patricios but known to the Mexicans by several different names including “los colorados” and “los voluntarios irlandeses.” When they were not training they were at local fiestas or the cockfights or the rodeos or in the cantinas, drinking and dicing and singing along with the guitar players. They larked with the girls in the bagnios. It was a mindless time of the sort familiar to all soldiers who have ever waited for the call to battle. But every now and then a look passed between the three friends, a look bespeaking a sad foreknowledge understood to them all though none could have explained it if he’d wanted to, which none of them did.

  John now discovered that tequila in sufficient quantity did much to keep his dreams at bay. He learned how much and how fast to drink of an evening so that he could get back to camp under his own power and yet sleep dreamless as a stone. The hangovers were a small price to pay for sleep undisturbed by visions of his past, but the nightly fights were another matter. He was now easily provoked and had again taken to carrying a knife in his boot. He cut out a local citizen’s eye in an alley scrape, and in another tavern brawl cut two Mexican comrades so severely it was thought they would die, though neither did. The civilian was a known thief and despoiler of young girls and so nobody made a case for him, but in the latter incident the army charged John with criminal assault.

  At the trial Lieutenant John Riley argued on John’s behalf before General Arista and his judicial staff, citing Sergeant Little as a valuable member of the San Patricio Battalion, a man who had risked his life crossing the Rio Bravo to come fight for Mexico, and one who had simply been defending himself in the saloon fight in question. General Arista himself presided over the court. He looked intently at John Little and remarked that he was most grateful to him for his allegiance to Mexico but hoped he would find no future cause to defend himself so well against anyone but the Yankee invaders. And then dismissed the charges.

  Arista had greater problems than John Little. In July he was court-martialed for his blundering leadership at Matamoros and dismissed from the army. Again appointed commander of the Army of the North was Pedro Ampudia, he who once cut off a rival general’s head and fried it in oil the better to preserve it for display over the main gate of his hacienda.

  Rumors were rife too that Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana would soon be back from exile in Cuba to take over the presidency as well as the army.

  12

  In midsummer the Mexican army moved to Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, a venerable old city on the north bank of the Rio Santa Catarina. The city was encircled by jagged gothic-spired ranges awesome to the San Patricios, few of whom had seen mountains other than the Appalachians, tame inclines by comparison. They enjoyed the city’s splendor and amenities for a few short weeks before word came in September of Taylor’s advancing force. The Patricios were posted with the big guns in the Citadel, an impregnable fortress the Mexicans called the Bishop’s Palace and which the Americans would come to name the Black Fort. Hundreds of residents fled the city in advance of Taylor’s coming,
taking with them all they could load on their animals and carry in their arms. Others remained and formed citizens’ brigades and put up barricades in the streets. A party of Roman Catholic bishops performed a series of benediction rites on the front steps of the main cathedral.

  On a gray Friday afternoon, the eighteenth of September, Taylor appeared at the edge of a woods on the outskirts of town in the company of a dozen officers. The San Patricios knew him even at the distance, knew his white horse and the attitude of its rider. At a wall of the Citadel Riley said he believed he could win the war right now. He adjusted the elevation of his gun and touched off the piece. The solid-shot cannonball keened through the air and struck not ten yards in front of Old Zack and bounced and cleared his head by less than three feet. Had Taylor been standing in the stirrups the ball would have taken off his head. Had the round been explosive it would have reduced the man to stewmeat. It was altogether a spectacular shot and the Mexicans cheered it wildly and pounded Riley on the back.

  But Taylor wasn’t standing in the stirrups and the round was not explosive and at the ball’s passing he turned in the saddle to watch it bound into a pecan grove with a pack of camp dogs in yammering pursuit of it. He leaned and spat and reined his horse about and said to his wide-eyed staff, “I expect you fellers’d feel more comfortable if we took ourselves back a bit, say to that fine little spring we saw the other side a them pecan trees?” And so they did.

  All through the night Mexican bugles played the “Deguello,” a chilling tune signifying no quarter, the piece inherited from the Spanish who first heard it as an ancient Moorish chant calling for the cutting of every last enemy throat.

  And in the morning the battle began.

  The fighting raged three days and nights. The U.S. artillery was of meager effect against the Bishop’s Palace and the Mexican round shot was good for little save laughter in the American ranks. The early fighting was between cavalries, and then the infantries clashed at the town perimeters, and then the fighting was house-to-house in the streets. A thick haze of gunsmoke rose over the town. The bayonet ruled. Blood ran in the cobblestones, streamed from the rooftop gutters, spattered the whitewashed walls. Came a thunderstorm and then another as the fighting raged on. The surrounding countryside went to mud. Rainwater ran pink in the streets. The carnage showed stark under shivering blue lightning. The San Patricios fired and fired their cannons into the Yankees until all shot was spent and then took up their muskets. Curses carried in English and in Spanish. Men shrieked in terror and murderous intent, screamed for help, cried for God’s mercy, begged for their mother’s tender hand. Women joined the barricade defenses and proved fierce soldaderas. John saw one cleave a Yankee head with a two-hand swipe of her machete a moment before she was skewered by bayonets and blood gouted from her mouth and she cursed her killers and died. The Americans brought cannister to bear on the barricades and fired point-blank as with Brobding-nagian shotguns and Mexican defenders flew back with faces gone, limbs severed, viscera looping through the air, blood spraying and mixing with the falling rain. The air stank of gore and shit. The monstrous elephant was amok.

  Three days of slaughter exhausted both sides. An armistice was struck and the shooting stopped. The dead lay everywhere. Mounds of mutilated men and women. A vast fly-swarmed bloating of horses and mules. Carrion birds blacked the sky. The howls and harries of wolves drove grave-digging parties to distraction. The stench of the dead was a continuing assault.

  A joint commission of American and Mexican officers agreed to the surrender of Monterrey on the condition that the Mexican army be permitted to retire from the city with its weapons. The evacuation took three days. The Mexicans marched away with drums beating and banners waving high. The Yankee ranks muttered and watched them pass by and some recognized the deserters among them and let out cries of execration. Riley especially was the object of their curses and maledict warnings. He spat and stared straight ahead but Lucas Malone grinned at the Yankees’ raging faces and recognized Master Sergeant Kaufmann among them and gestured obscenely at him and at them all. A platoon of Irishmen who’d kept the faith and hated the deserters for having blacked the reputations of all sons of Eire started for him but were driven back by their mounted officers. “We’ll have at them in good time, boys,” John heard a Yank officer say. “You’ll see. They can only run so far and then we’ll have them, by God.”

  13

  They retreated two hundred fifty miles south to the silvermine city of San Luis Potosí, more than a mile high in the mountains, and there regrouped yet once again. Santa Ana had returned from Cuba as expected and was hailed by his countrymen as the Deliverer. He took charge of the army and reformed it as the Liberating Army of the North. He granted permission for the San Patricios to fly their own flag and Riley engaged the nuns of the local convent to fashion a banner of his design. Green silk it was, showing on one side a shamrock and a harp bordered by the Mexican coat of arms and its motto, “Libertad por la Republica Mexicana,” and underneath the harp the motto, “Erin go Bragh.” On the other side of the banner was a painting of Saint Patrick with a key in his left hand and in his right a staff pinioning a serpent, and under the painting was the name “San Patricio.” The men of the company cheered lustily at its first unfurling. John was surprised to feel himself stirred by this emblem of men like himself, by this bright green flag of the rootless and the damned.

  They trained and readied and recruited for the next four months and in that time another fifty Americans deserted Taylor and made their way to San Luis to join the Saint Patricks. Riley was all business in the training of them. The loss at Monterrey had shaken his certainty that Mexico would win the war against the Americans—or gringos, as the Mexicans had taken to calling the invaders, deriving the name from “Green Grow the Rushes,” a song the Yankees were often heard to sing. Handsome Jack tried not to show it but John and Lucas could see that his confidence in Mexican army leadership had shrunk considerably since Monterrey.

  But if Riley’s faith in their leaders was waning, his fidelity to the Saint Patricks grew ever greater—and he would abide no failure of the faith in his comrades. In November two men of the company deserted. They were captured a week later in civilian clothes as they tried to make their way to Tampico to get a ship out of the country. They were brought back to San Luis Potosí in manacles and put on trial for desertion. The adjudicating officers were a regimental infantry colonel named Gomez, Captain Moreno and Lieutenant Riley. All three voted for conviction. Colonel Gomez was against the death penalty but was overruled by Moreno and Riley. Riley requested and was granted command of the firing squad. He ordered all Saint Patricks to attend the executions.

  “No one knows the seriousness of desertion better than those who have themselves deserted,” he told the assembled company. “A man may have good cause to desert once, aye, but he who deserts twice proves himself a faithless vagabond deserving of no man’s brotherhood. So it is with these two. At least from us they receive a bullet, but never forget that should you be taken by the enemy what you’ll get is a noose.”

  The condemned were stood each in his turn before a side wall of the central plaza cathedral and permitted to say a few last words before being blindfolded. The first said he wanted someone to tell his mother he loved her. The second said he hoped the whole damned world went to heaven so he wouldn’t have to see any of it again in hell. They were shot by a six-man San Patricio firing squad selected by lots and including Lucas Malone. That evening when they were drunk in the Oso Rojo, Lucas told John, “Damnedest thing. For a minute there I thought I was takin aim at meself. Saw meself standin there blindfolded. Damnedest thing …”

  John said nothing, though in truth the executions had made him wonder how much real difference there was between them and the army they’d deserted. And Riley’s argument that desertion was permissible the first time but never thereafter struck him as self-serving horseshit. Every desertion was damnable or no desertion was. But he was an officer
now, Handsome Jack, and John wondered if perhaps officers had more in common with other officers—officers of any army—than they did with the men in the ranks.

  14

  Came Christmas Eve, and while Jack Riley was at midnight mass and Lucas Malone with a Mexican girl he’d recently taken up with, John got into a fight with two men at the Oso Rojo. He gave one a kick to the balls that lifted him a foot off the floor before he fell in a vomiting heap, then broke the other’s arm in shedding him of his knife and flung him from the cantina into the street. Not two minutes later this man returned with a pepperbox pistol in his good hand and shot John twice in the back as he stood at the bar. John slumped against the counter and turned around and the man now shot him once in the chest and then the pistol misfired on the next two tries and the assailant turned and ran away. John slipped to the floor and fell over on the hardpacked clay and felt the life running out of him. He heard Daddyjack’s loud laughter and thought also he heard Maggie weeping. He lay with his cheek against the cold clay and felt eyes looking down upon him and he thought, So this is how I’m done with.

  He was not however done with, though the doctors could not extract one of the pistolballs and so left it in him and it was two weeks before they were willing to say he might not die of his wounds. He was still very weak near the end of January when Santa Ana and the army departed north for another fight with the gringos. On the night before they left, Riley and Lucas paid him a visit in the hospital. Handsome Jack pressed a medallion of the Holy Mother into his palm. Lucas Malone said he would bring him Kaufmann’s ears. After they left, John gave the medallion to one of the nurses.