by Blake, J
In early July they caught up to Anastasio Torrejón’s gang in the highlands near Las Vigas where they were lying in ambush for a U.S. pack train coming from Veracruz. The company had been informed of the rancheros’ plan and came around from the west and behind them and caught them by surprise in a drizzling rain. The ensuing fight lasted an hour and four of the company were wounded although only two seriously enough to be of no further service. They killed all twenty-two of the Torrejón bunch. Dominguez sent to Hitchcock a courier report of their success and a string of the guerrillas’ horses.
Ten days later they tracked down the Miñon gang to its hideout in a canyon just north of Orizaba. The rancheros made a run for it and the fight carried for three days and covered nearly fifty miles before the last of the Miñonistas went down. As a warning to other bandits and rancheros in the vicinity the company hung naked Miñonista corpses by their heels from a tree every few miles along the road between Orizaba and Córdoba. Mexican officials of both church and state complained in outrage to the American authorities and Hitchcock sent a detail to cut down the bodies and bury them. But there was no reprimand of the Spy Company.
The company next rode into the sierras north of Jalapa and searched out the ranchero band of Lucero Carbajal. The fight was fierce but quick and when it was done Dominguez found his old friend still alive among the fallen though he’d been mortally wounded in the belly. Dominguez sat and cradled Lucero’s head in his lap and mopped his brow and rolled cigarettes for him. Edward and Spooner sat close by and waved away any others who approached. Dominguez and Carbajal spoke of the old days and sang songs they had learned together as children and every time Lucero screamed with a new rush of pain Dominguez gripped his hands tightly and whispered to him to be strong, be strong. They watched the western sky turn bloody red behind the mountains and Carbajal said the sight was the most beautiful in all God’s world and Dominguez agreed. A moment later Carbajal was dead and Dominguez and Rogelio Gomez who had also known Lucero since boyhood dug his grave in the dark and buried him. The rest of the rancheros they left to the scavengers.
33
They arrived back in Puebla in the first week of August to find Scott ready to begin his move on Mexico City at last. He decided that one squad of the Spy Company would go with him, one would stay behind in Puebla under the authority of Colonel Childs. Dominguez selected Spooner’s band to go with Scott and he put himself in command of it. They set out on a red-streaked daybreak—foot soldiers, cavalry, artillery limbers, caissons, supply wagons, a military train that stretched for rumbling miles and wound about the mountain trails like an enormous martial snake.
The Spy Company rode well ahead of the main force and through the day Dominguez alternated between Spooner and Edward as his report riders to Scott, thinking the general would be grateful not to need an interpreter. And grateful Scott was, but he and his fellow officers had as well been surprised to learn of a pair of Americans riding with the Spy Company. Spooner had carried the first report and on his return he warned Edward of what to expect, but still, the first time he rode to the main body, Edward had suddenly felt every eye in the column fixed sharply on him as he rode past on his way to Scott’s wagon. And then in the general’s quarters he’d been subjected to the severe scrutiny of the half-dozen other officers in attendance. He’d removed his hat and reported that the road ahead looked to be all clear for at least the next ten miles and Scott thanked him and was about to dismiss him when General Worth asked his name and where he hailed from.
“Edward Boggs, sir, from Tennessee. Nashville.”
A bullnecked, whitebearded general named Twiggs asked if he’d ever worn the uniform of his true country. Edward said he’d never been in service before signing on with the Spy Company. Twiggs looked around at his fellows with a narrow smile and said it might be interesting to check the deserter rolls for the name of Edward Boggs. He started to say something else but Scott broke in and asked Edward why he wore the bandanna over his head.
“An accident, sir,” he said. “It’s to cover it over.”
“Let’s have a look,” said a general with muttonchops joining his thick mustache though his chin was shaved close. Edward looked at Scott and the general returned his stare blankly. So he took off the bandanna.
“Damn, son,” the muttonchops said.
“I fell down drunk one night, sir, I’m ashamed to say, and my hair caught aflame from the cookfire. My own fool fault.” He quickly retied the bandanna over his crown.
Several officers exchanged smiling glances and one said, “I once saw such a—” but Scott silenced him with a raised finger.
“I too have seen similar scars on some few other heads,” Scott said. “Curiously, all the heads belonged to men who had been fallen upon by savages yet were lucky enough to escape with their lives, if not the entirety of their hair.” The officers laughed and Edward felt his face flush hotly.
“No, Davy,” Scott said confidently to the general named Twiggs, “I do not believe this young man is likely to prove a deserter. No one with such, ah, campfire scars on his head could be so cowardly as to desert his ranks.” He smiled at Edward and made a gesture of dismissal and Edward hastily saluted and exited the wagon.
A group of enlisted men stood nearby and watched him closely as he went to his horse and mounted up. He heard one say something about “a damn deserter in that Mex scout outfit.”
But another quickly said, “How’s he be a deserter if he’s reporting to General Scott and got the U.S. insignia on his coat?”
“He’s riding with Mexicans, aint he?”
“Those Mexes are on our side, you damn fool!”
“Shitfire, you’re the damn fool if ye believe any Mex be on our side!”
34
Three days west of Puebla they came up through a wide pass flanking the great volcano called Popocatepetl and crested a ridge and of a sudden found themselves looking out upon the entire Valley of Mexico three thousand feet below and spread out before them like a vast map of bright green felt. It lay engirt by a sharp and darkly rugged range, a mountainous circle 120 miles in circumference. And there, directly ahead and blazing like some vision conjured of medieval magic was the fabled city of the Aztecs. The towers of Mexico City stood so vivid in the sharp cool air they seemed to Edward close enough to hit with a rifleshot but were in fact some twenty-five miles distant. The three great lakes about the city blazed like silver mirrors. It was a vista to awe even Dominguez and the few others who had seen it before, and those who looked upon it for the first time could not put into words what they beheld, this portion of earth fashioned by ancient gods unknown.
When Scott arrived and gazed at the panorama he too was bedazzled. Dominguez beamed as if the vista were his personal gift to him. “Look!” Scott said, spreading his arms toward the valley in the manner of a munificent war lord bestowing wondrous spoils upon his minions. “Look there, my brothers! The very seat of the Montezumas! And soon, soon, by all that’s right and holy, that splendid city shall be ours!”
VII
THE BROTHERS
1
In Mexico City Santa Ana made ready. He put the federal district and surrounding states under martial law. He emptied the prisons into military training camps. He ordered every able-bodied Mexican male between the ages of fifteen and sixty to enlist in the army. Press gangs prowled the streets round the clock. Civilian construction crews were conscripted to build new defenseworks and reinforce existing ones. They flooded the surrounding marshland flanking the narrow causeways to prevent Yankee artillery from wheeling over it. Private livestock and conveyances were confiscated by the army in the name of national emergency. American civilians were ordered to join the Mexican military or get out of town.
The San Patricios were quartered in the citadel, on the western side of the city. From there they could look across the flat marsh to the spectacular castle of Chapultepec less than two miles distant on a hill at the far end of the Belen Causeway. Awaiting thei
r orders they passed the days training recruits and seeing to their weapons and gear. They gambled and wrote letters and got up fistfights to break the boredom. In the evenings and on Sunday afternoons they made rounds of the city and found spectacle on every side. The bullfight plaza was larger, its pageantry more expansive, its aficionados louder than they had witnessed in Puebla. They stood agape before the National Palace and then wandered across the vast main square of the Zócalo thronged with vendors, viejas, beggars, musicians and street entertainers of every stripe. They stepped timorously into the incensed shadows of the gargantuan National Cathedral whose vaulted and groined ceilings were dizzying to look upon and whose altars blazed with polished gold. They remarked upon the realistic renditions of the violence visited on Christ and the various saints depicted on the walls and windows. Moreno had seen much human flesh impaled by arrows during his tour of duty in the Yaqui lands of Sonora and he attested to the accuracy of the wounds inflicted on the statue of Saint Sebastian. It was not the first time John had been struck by such fidelity to violent detail in Mexican religious art. The nailed hands and feet of the sculpted Christ on the Cross, the gash in His side looked as though they would bloody the fingers put to them. The world, he reflected, was naught but killing and rites of blood, even among the pious. The stronger killed and ate the weaker, and the weakest of all fed on the leavings. It was Nature’s ruling principle, the most ancient of its immutable laws.
They toured the National Museum and saw bones of man and beast thousands of years older than the first writ word of history, saw gleaming Aztec daggers of obsidian that had religiously excised, steaming and still abeat, human hearts beyond number. They strolled through the sundappled park at Chapultepec and were poled on dugouts across the flower-strewn beauty of Lake Xochimilco.
And when they had done with enjoying the wonders of the city proper they repaired to brothels as finely appointed as aristocratic salons and staffed with the most desirable whores in Mexico. But not even the pleasures of the girls in La Casa de la Contessa, girls as lovely as daydreams and whiteskinned as any of the Saint Patricks themselves, could long distract them from the knowledge that the Americans were marching their way.
2
Hearsay of every sort came to them, the most disturbing being that they would not be used in the defense of the city at all. One rumor had it that Santa Ana did not trust them to fight against their fellow Americans. Another, that if the defense of the capital did not succeed, he intended to turn them over to the Americans in exchange for certain concessions. Some of the Patricios said they sure enough wouldn’t put it past any damn general, Yank or Mex, to doublecross his men that way and wondered aloud if maybe it would be wise to slip away while the slipping was good. Riley said he would beat the shit out of the next man who said such a thing and would personally shoot any among them who attempted desertion.
The San Patricio ranks had in fact increased in recent weeks and both companies were now but a few men shy of their full strength of one hundred men each. In U.S. camps from Veracruz to the advance units now within fifteen miles of the city, Santa Ana’s English handbills called on Yankee soldiers to reject the unjust American cause and come to Mexico’s noble defense of true liberty and the Mother Church. The fliers had drawn a new influx of deserters eager to reap the promised rewards of “rich fields and large tracts of land, which being cultivated by your industry, shall crown you with happiness and convenience.”
Handsome Jack himself wrote a handbill for circulation:
“My Countrymen, Irishmen! I urge you to abandon a slavish hireling’s life with a nation who treats you with contumely and disgrace. For whom are you contending? For a people who, in the face of the whole world, and who in their greed for more and yet more territory, and more and yet more peaceloving peoples to rule over as despots, trample upon the holy altars of our religion and set firebrands to all sanctuańes devoted to the Blessed Virgin! My Countrymen, I have experienced the hospitality of the citizens of this true Republic, and I say to you that from the moment I extended to them the hand of friendship I was received with kindness. Though I was poor, I was relieved; though undeserving, I was respected; and I pledge you my oath, that the same feelings extended toward me await you also.”
Lucas Malone read a fresh copy of it over John’s shoulder and said, “Bedamn but Jack can scribble a sermon, caint he? Makes me wish I was back on the other side just so’s I could desert all over again.”
In his fervor for recruits Handsome Jack made daily visits to the erstwhile monastery of Santiago Tlatelolco and proselytized among the captured American soldiers imprisoned there. Most cursed him for a turncoat son of a bitch and said they would see his head on a pike, but others succumbed to his suasions and the promised Mexican rewards and found themselves in a Saint Patrick uniform within the hour of accepting his offer.
3
On a sunny Thursday morning came the order for them to proceed at once to the village of Churubusco about five miles south of the citadel and reinforce the defense of the Rio Churubusco Bridge.
“About damn time!” Lucas Malone said. The bunch of them were grinning fiercely The order dispelled their apprehension that Santa Ana was reserving them as bargaining pawns.
“Sure now Señor Napoleon finally come to realize we got lots more to lose than any Mexie does if we get took prisoner,” remarked a Patricio named Tom Cassady. “Hell man, it’s us got the most good reason of anybody to see the Yanks beat back.”
“Churubusco,” said a redbeard named O’Connor as they readied to move out. “Is that be the name of some famous Spanish general or somebody?”
“No,” Colonel Moreno said. “It is Aztec, that word. It means, ah, where the war god—how do you say—the place where the birds come to their nest? In the evening?”
“A roost?”
“Sí! Churubusco. It means the roost of the war god.”
“The war god be a bird?”
“Like a ferocious bird—like an eagle. And also like a snake. The war god is like Mexico. He is like all the wild things of the blood.”
4
They crossed the Rio Churubusco that afternoon under a glaring sun veiled in thin ragged clouds. The sight of the Saint Patrick banner snapping in the breeze drew cheers from the two infantry regiments defending the stone bridge. “Viva los Colorados! Viva los San Patricios!” The infantrymen had constructed a bridgehead marked by a high U-shaped parapet behind which were posted two battalions of riflemen and three artillery pieces. The parapet afforded an excellent field of fire and was fronted by a watery ditch some twenty feet wide. The bridgehead overlooked a causeway flanked on both sides by deep ditches and soggy marshland. The causeway ran south for nearly two miles to the pueblo of San Antonio. It was one of only two approaches the Americans could take to the bridge. The other was the Coyoacán Road. On either causeway they would be open targets.
The Patricios raised their fists in salute to the cheering Mexicans. They veered from the bridgehead and trooped onto the Coyoacán Road and followed it southwestward for two hundred yards to the imposing Convent of San Mateo. The convent consisted of several monastery buildings and a church with a high thick steeple. A half-mile southward lay a lava bed called the Pedregal, some fifteen square miles of blackly adamantine volcanic rock sharp enough to cut through bootsoles and savage even the shod hooves of horses. Together with the surrounding marshland and dense cornfields, the Pedregal blocked all approach to Churubusco except by the Coyoacán and San Antonio roads.
They filed through the huge front gates to the stirring music of an army band and the resounding vivas of the two battalions already there under the command of General Manuel Rincón. The convent was enclosed by twelve-foot-high stone walls containing rifle loopholes and a wide scaffolding on which were positioned a quartet of eight-pounder guns. In the center of the cobbled courtyard was a large fountain bordered by a brick walkway lined with cypress trees and flowering shrubs. Along the base of the eastern wall bloomed a vivid re
d rose garden. Rincón bade the Saint Patricks welcome and made a brief but eloquent speech about their nobility and heroism. More vivas and march music followed and then the general took Moreno aside and conferred with him briefly, pointing here and there around the convent as he spoke, leaning close to him to be heard above the din of the band. The two men exchanged salutes and Moreno returned to his men and apprised them of their specific duties.
The convent walls would be manned by Rincón’s infantry but the four big guns would be crewed by San Patricios. Two of the guns were trained on the San Antonio Road and two on the southern stretch of the Coyoacán Road by which the Yankees would have to come in order to attack the convent. The road was flanked on one side by marsh and on the other by a muddy field of ripe corn and was visible all the way to a small rise almost a half-mile to the south where stood the tiny village of Coyoacán and a squad of lookouts posted there. Beyond the rise, the road ran west to San Angel, a mile farther on.
The flat roofs of the monastery buildings were edged by low protective walls and made excellent ramparts. Saturnino O’Leary’s company was assigned to them. The core of the convent’s defense was the church itself. Its huge steeple was girt by a wide stonewalled walkway that commanded a clear view of the surrounding countryside. The position was ideal for riflemen as well as for the six-pounder gun and the pair of four-pounders Rincón had already placed there. Its defense was given to Handsome Jack Riley’s company and a platoon of Mexican riflemen.