by Blake, J
“Por acá!” Dominguez was at an inner door, pistol in hand, gesturing for them to go up the stairway just beyond. “Arriba! Arriba en el campanario hay una bola de artilleristas. Mátenlos, muchachos, mátenlos todos!” He let Chucho and a dozen others lead the scramble up the winding stairway to the door leading out to the steeple walkway and fell in beside Edward and showed him a crazyman’s grin. Clambering up the stairs behind them came a surge of Yankee riflemen with a bellowing captain in the lead.
“Está abierta!” Chucho shouted, surprised to find the door unbolted. He kicked it open wide to admit a blaze of daylight—and a deafening blast of canister tore him and five others to pieces and sprayed their bloody bits over the men below them on the stairs.
8
The canister was their last artillery round. Jack had charged the gun and turned it toward the door and ordered the bolt shot back and said, “We’ll give them a warm welcome, by Jesus!” They had not a rifle bullet left among them, only a few loaded caplock pistols, only their ready knives and bayonets now as the Yankees came howling through the smoke and the destroyed doorway. But the first of them weren’t Yankees at all—they were Mexicans in flat black hats and strange uniforms that bore the U.S. insignia and one of the Mexican defenders blurted, ‘Oye, pero qué—?” and the Black Hats fired from the hip and dropped a dozen dumbfounded San Patricios where they stood before they all came together in a clash of bayonets and rifle butts and slashing sabers and knives and curses and shrieks. Men fell in sprays of blood from gashed throats and ripped bellies and punctured femorals. Those San Patricios armed with pistols shot whom they could with their single round and then flailed wildly with the empty guns. John was thrusting with his bayonet and clubbing with the rifle butt and falling back along the blood-slicked walkway as the Black Hats and now regular Yankee soldiers too pressed in on him and the dwindling Patricios around him. He impaled a grayhaired Black Hat through the stomach but the bayonet would not come free so he let go the rifle and drew his charged pistol with one hand and his knife with the other and now saw Lucas Malone wrestling with a Black Hat over a bayoneted rifle and he slashed the Black Hat’s neck to the bone. Lucas grinned at him and then a numbing blow on the side of his face sat John down hard. A Yankee loomed over him and made to slash at him with a saber but John was the quicker and stabbed him between the legs and the soldier screamed and dropped his sword and fell away. And there was Edward in his black hat not six feet distant and staring at him open-mouthed and in that moment a San Patricio ran a bayonet into Edward’s side. John shot the Patricio in the head a bare second before he himself was knocked back and his head struck stone and then the wavering image of a grinning Yankee soldier clarified into that of Master Sergeant Kaufmann who stood astraddle him and raised a bayoneted rifle to run him through—but a forearm appeared around Kaufmann’s face and a knife moved across his throat and blood leapt from the open wound and Kaufmann died as he fell. Edward stood with knife in hand and blood slogging down his side and he was gaping at his brother—and then abruptly doubled over and grabbed his knee and then spasmed and fell forward and John scrambled atop him and embraced him tightly and tensed himself for a bullet or blade in the back but now someone was hollering, “Cease action! Cease action, goddamnit, it’s done!”
9
He awoke on a stretcher laid on the courtyard stones. The sun glared just above the west wall and the air smelled of smoke and carnage and was snarling with flies. There was moaning and weeping all around, cursing loud and low in both English and Spanish, pleas for water, for medical attention, for a bullet to end the pain. To one side of him lay a man with no face who yet breathed. On his other side lay a blond and dead-eyed American soldier whose viscera were visible through a large raw hole in his flank.
His knee throbbed and his side was on fire and every heartbeat pounded his skull with pain. The sky looked atilt. Now he heard a voice shrieking curses in Spanish, vilifying someone as turds, as filthy snakes, the vomit of pigs, the bottoms of shit pits, as even worse traitors to Mexico than La Malinche, the whore of Cortés.
He struggled up onto his elbows to see over the dead man beside him and caught sight of a column of Mexican prisoners being led across the courtyard with a general at its fore and it was he who was cursing so stridently. He had an arm bound up against his chest and a bloodstained bandage over one eye and the objects of his vilification were the onlooking members of the Spy Company. Dominguez stood by with his coatee open and his thumbs hooked in his belt and he stared back at the passing general without expression or remark. Spooner stood beside him and stared back too, grinning largely, one arm in a sling and a bandage around his thigh. The other compañeros were all looking off in various directions and none of them meeting the eyes of the general who so vehemently denunciated them. The general swept them with an accusing finger as he limped past and swore that Mexico would exact its vengeance on them for the miserable turncoat whoresons that they were. The women accompanying the prisoners spat at the men of the Spy Company, and the compañeros backed out of range until the women had gone by.
Then came the captured Americans in Mexican uniforms and now the great crowd of U.S. soldiers began excoriating them and spitting at them and pelting them with rocks and mud and dogshit and calling for their blood, calling for them to be shot on the spot, to be hanged from the cypress trees. Their most sulfurous fulminations were directed at a tall redhead whom Edward recognized as the man who had shot the Mexican in the steeple for trying to wave a white flag. “We’ll all of us piss on yer grave, Riley, ye miserable bastard!” one hollered at him. The one called Riley looked at the man and clapped a hand on his bicep and raised his fist. The Americans howled with rage and began surging forward and they would surely have torn Riley and his fellows to pieces had not Generals Twiggs and Worth, sitting their horses in the forefront of the crowd, ordered them to stand fast.
“You’re the lowest scum on the earth!” A wildfaced Irishman shouted at the passing prisoners. “The filthiest bastards to ever shame the face of God is what you are!”
“You’ll see these sons of bitches hang, boys!” Twiggs bellowed. “Every last traitorous dog of them!”
Edward strained to hold his head up, scanning the column of American prisoners and finally spying John as he trudged past in his bloodstained tunic, hatless and indifferent to the maledictions raining on him and his fellows. Hardly flinching as a rock glanced off his shoulder. Staring dead ahead as if fixed upon an impatient fate.
Edward fell back and the sky above whirled and he spun into darkness.
10
When next he woke he was in the U.S. Army hospital at Tacubaya, within two miles of the heart of the capital. He had been unconscious for nearly three days. He’d lost much blood through the bayonet wound in his side and his kidney had been damaged and the doctors had thought he might die. Then his fever began to ease and the worst was past. But his knee had been shattered by a pistol ball and they debated whether to amputate and finally decided the leg could stay. But the knee would never again bend more than slightly and so he would limp for the rest of his life. “At least,” a doctor told him, “you’ll be limping on your own leg and not on a wooden stump.” He’d suffered a concussion as well, and the ringing in his ears would likely prove permanent. When one doctor asked what had happened to his scalp, Edward looked at him without expression and the doctor asked no more about it.
Over the following week he mostly slept, waking occasionally to gulp water as if trying to douse a fire in his belly, to slurp soup spooned to him by the nurses. But even the effort of trying to think clearly was exhausting, and so he slept. Slept and dreamt of Daddyjack with his single eye and in his bloody-crotched trousers wandering through the charred and smoky remains of a large razed house and muttering angrily to himself as he kicked at the smoldering cinders. He spotted Edward where he lay wounded and in a sweat on a blanket under a drooping willow. “Ye done good,” he said. “The both ye. Bloodkin’s all ye got in the wor
ld and ye got to protect ye brother and him to protect you. It’s how it be with brothers and no matter their blood’s been tainted.” He scratched his whiskered face and looked at Edward slyly. “Aye—tainted I say! Poisoned! Poisoned sure as if she put rattler venom in ye veins while ye were yet curled in her belly, you and ye brother and ye sister too. She poisoned my tree, that demon whore! Poisoned it and made it to bear a bad bitter fruit.” He went back to sifting through the ashes of the house and Edward wanted to speak to him but it was as if he’d been robbed of all language shaped of words.
11
When he finally sat up in bed and began eating with appetite and again taking notice of the world around him eleven days had passed since the battle of Churubusco. He was informed that Colonel Dominguez and others of the Spy Company had come by to see after him several times but he’d each time been asleep when they came and the doctor would not have them wake him. Two days ago the company had left as an escort to a military train bound for Veracruz.
From the nurses and fellow patients Edward learned that General Scott had halted his army just at the outskirts of Mexico City and struck an armistice with Santa Ana in order to discuss peace terms. On their pledge not to take up arms again for the rest of the war, Scott had released most of the three thousand Mexican prisoners captured in the push to the capital’s perimeter, and there’d been a good deal of muttering in the American ranks about that. “Lots of fellas think he ought to of shot them all,” said a man in the bed beside his, an artillery corporal named Walter Berry who’d lost a foot. “A dead man’s a lot less like to fight you again than a fella who promises he won’t.”
“Leastways Old Scotty didn’t turn loose a one of them deserter sonsabitches call themselfs Saint Paddies,” said a man named Alan Overmeyer who lay in the bed on Edward’s other flank. Overmeyer had lost his right arm and right leg and so he looked like he’d been halved by length.
“Hell no, he didn’t!” Walter Berry said. “Scotty’d let them go, his own army would of hung him, you bet!”
“That goddamn Santa Aner saying if he’d a had him a hundred more like them Saint Paddies he’d of won the fight. Shit! All the more reason to hang all the sons of bitches, I say. Saint Paddies, my sorry ass—Saint Judases more like it.”
They told Edward that more than half of the Saint Patrick Battalion had been killed at Churubusco. Nearly two dozen were unaccounted for and a few of them were presumed to have escaped. Some ninety had been captured and seventy-two of them charged with desertion from the United States Army. Scott wasted no time bringing them to trial. Forty-three had been tried at Tacubaya the Monday before last and three days later the other twenty-nine were tried at San Angel. Every man of them but two were found guilty and sentenced to hang.
“Ye should of heard the cheer in that San Angel court when the judges passed sentence on Riley,” a nurse named Marlin Grady said. “I was right there and I mean to tell ye I thought the roof would blow off the place, so loud it was. Oh, that’s one right hated bastard, Riley. It’s him formed that bunch of rebel Paddies and him that had the blasphemous balls to call them by good Saint Patrick’s name. He’s done naught but blacken us Irishmen each one, he has, the filthy son of a bitch.”
“They hung them all?” Edward asked, feeling his own throat constricting tightly. He saw John’s face before him now as clearly as he had up on the steeple walkway in the instant they’d caught sight of each other, his astonished bloodsmeared face.
“Not yet they aint, but it’s good as done, by Jesus,” said Walter Berry. “It’s only for Old Fuss and Feathers to approve the sentences all officiallike and then it’s the noose for them Judas bastards.”
The trials had been covered by The American Star, a Yankee newspaper that had begun publication in Jalapa and followed after the U.S. Army since, and Marlin Grady brought Edward some back issues so he could read the accounts for himself. He thereby learned that one of the Saint Patricks, a fellow named Ellis, was ruled never to have been properly enlisted and so was acquitted on that technicality—and two hours later was attacked in the street by a bunch of U.S. soldiers and beaten nearly to death before a crowd of Mexicans rescued him and spirited him away. Another Saint Patrick, Lewis Prefier, had not been in a Mexican uniform when captured, had in fact been completely naked, and he besides proved to be crazy, so loony he didn’t even know his own name and could not be made to understand the simplest questions put to him any more than could a dog, and so the court granted him a discharge paper and he was shortly thereafter driven from the gates of the garrison under a hail of flung stones.
Only six of the accused pled guilty. Most of the others all professed their innocence of deliberate desertion and claimed to have been coerced by one means or another into joining the Mexican side. A few held their tongues throughout. But the prosecution brought forth two Saint Patrick prisoners as witnesses, an Englishman and an Irishman who had been residents of Mexico since before the war and had never been in the American army. They were willing to testify against their fellow Patricks in exchange for early release from prison. They pointed at each of the accused in turn and said that they had seen him willingly put on the uniform of the Mexican army and bear arms against the Americans.
Included in the reports was an alphabetical list of the seventy men condemned to hang. And there—between “Klager, John” and “Logen-hamer, Henry”—Edward read the name of his only true brother in this world. And wanted to howl.
The newspaper also carried several sardonic accounts of the Mexican outcry against the death sentences passed on their beloved San Patricios. Civil and military officials of every rank protested publicly. The Archbishop of Mexico himself made a plea to Winfield Scott on their behalf, as did the British foreign minister. The Irish leader of the deserters, John Riley, whom the Americans held as the most detestable of the loathsome lot, attracted the most ardent defenders. A petition for clemency toward him was submitted to Scott and signed by nearly two dozen “Citizens of the United States and Foreigners of different Nations in the City of Mexico.” It read, in part:
We humbly pray that his Excellency the General in Chief of the American forces may be graciously pleased to extend a pardon to Captain John O’Reilly of the Legion of St. Patrick and generally speaking to all deserters from the American service.
We speak to your Excellency particularly of O’Reilly as we understand his life to be in most danger; his conduct might be pardoned by your Excellency in consideration of the protection he extended in this city to persecuted and banished American citizens by nullifying an order he held to apprehend them and not acting on it. We believe him to have a generous heart admitting all his errors.
In response to the clamor for leniency toward the Saint Patricks, General David Twiggs told The American Star that it was Generals Santa Ana and Ampudia and Arista who had solicited and “seduced from duty” the men who deserted the American ranks, and so it was they who were responsible for the price the “poor wretches” would now pay for their crimes.
12
Over the next week Edward fast regained strength. The wound in his side knit tightly and he got out of bed and for longer periods every day and walked up and down the ward, the first two days with the aid of a crutch before he switched to a cane. Yet he felt like a man in a dream. The world about him was starkly clear but seemed to move slowly, as if underwater. He felt an unyielding dread. Each time he closed his eyes he saw his brother’s face. He had no thoughts at all.
Now came Scott’s rulings on the verdicts of the courts. For various reasons he granted outright pardons to five of the condemned. In fifteen other cases he found that the men had deserted before the war’s official declaration and therefore could not, according to the Articles of War, be legally executed. These fifteen would instead receive fifty lashes on the bare back and be hot-iron branded on the cheek with a D for “deserter.” They would thereafter remain imprisoned until the U.S. Army removed itself from Mexico, at which time they would have their head
s shaved to the scalp and the buttons ripped from their uniforms and be drummed out of service to the tune of “The Rogue’s March”:
Poor old soldier; poor old soldier;
tarred and feathered and sent to hell,
because he would not soldier well.
The sentences of the fifty others he let stand. They would hang.
On learning that John Riley was one of the fifteen to be spared the rope the hospital went into uproar. Chamber pots were pitched through windows and plates of food sent crashing against the walls. Scott was cursed for a stupid bastard. Walter Berry shouted, “Riley’s the main whoreson of them! He’s the one most goddamn well ought to hang!” Overmeyer wept with fury. The outrage was rampant through the ranks. The Star quoted Scott’s aide-de-camp as saying the general had walked the floor each night as he struggled with his decision. He had known the troops would be inflamed by the commutation of Riley’s sentence. His staff officers had argued that it would be preferable to spare all the other turncoats than to reprieve Riley. Scott rebutted them with the point that the law was the law, that the Articles of War prohibited Riley’s execution, and if he did not cleave to the law he would as much violate his own duty as John Riley had violated his. He would sooner be killed in the assault on Mexico City, he reportedly said, than to violate his duty to the law.
Edward wanted only to know who besides Riley had been spared from execution, but he could not of course reveal he had bloodkin amid the traitors. He hobbled through the ward trying to cadge a newspaper but none of the few who had one would part with it while they read and cursed and re-read the hard news about Riley. Marlin Grady finally went out and bought more newspapers and Edward took one and sat on his bed and spread it before him and scanned the names of the fully pardoned five and recognized none. He cursed lowly and then ran his eye down the list of fifteen whose sentences had been commuted and did not see John’s name. He saw Riley’s but not John’s and his breath caught and his throat tightened and he felt like screaming, like shooting somebody. Then he slowly went down the list again, this time with his finger, and this time touched on “Little, John” and he looked and looked at the name and was afraid to take his eyes from it for fear it would not be there the next time he looked.