The Alamo

by Frank Thompson

  “If we can get up on the roof of my workshop,” Smith said, “we will have a clear shot at the plaza.”

  “Are there Mexicans in any of the houses?” Milam said.

  “Most of ’em,” said Smith.

  Milam nodded. “Well, let us see how far we can get before they see us.”

  He waved forward and they ran toward the edge of town in a crouch, in groups of six or seven, fanning out onto either side of Acequia Street.

  Coming parallel to Milam’s party down Soledad Street, Frank Johnson led another sixty Texians toward the Veramendi House. The most lavish home in town, it was once occupied by James Bowie. Situated on the east bend of the river, its courtyard offered an unobstructed view of the Alamo.

  A shot rang out and a Texian named Curilla grabbed his arm in pain, blood seeping through his fingers. Erastus “Deaf” Smith snapped his rifle up and shot the sniper off the roof of the Veramendi House. At forty-eight, Deaf Smith was one of the oldest men in the fight, and he had been drawn into the conflict only reluctantly. A cattle rancher, originally from New York, he had a Mexican wife and four children. He only wanted to live in peace. But if the Mexican army was going to prevent that, so be it—he would fight for his home.

  The rest of the men scurried down the street until a blast of canister shot cut through them from an emplacement at the corner of the plaza. Men cried out and scattered to the sides of the street. Hermann Ehrenberg, a young German volunteer, threw himself to the ground in the middle of the street. “Gott in himmel!” he said, his arm over his eyes.

  Musket fire followed the cannon, balls pinging off the stone walls, kicking up dirt around Ehrenberg on the ground. “Take cover!” Milam shouted. Ehrenberg scrambled up and ran back, joining the other men as they retreated to the Veramendi House, pausing along the way to help a wounded comrade. At the Veramendi House, the Texians smashed through doors and windows with boots and rifle butts. Another canister shot whistled through them. Four men fell to the ground wounded. One of them gaped dumbly at the gushing stump that, seconds earlier, had been his left leg.

  Now the fighting was door to door, house to house, all around Béxar’s main plaza. Men popped out from doorways and windows to take potshots at each other. The combatants were separated at times by only ten or twenty yards. Texians darted from one side of the street to the other. At every step they were fired on by riflemen on the rooftops, causing the Texians to scurry back to their original cover.

  Deaf Smith and Lieutenant Hall of the New Orleans Greys clambered up a wooden ladder to the roof of the Veramendi House, crawling on their bellies to the lip of the south end. They looked down toward the plaza, where almost two hundred Mexican troops were dug in around San Fernando church. Smith took a bead on one of the cannon crew at the northeast corner of the plaza, but before he could fire, a small hail of bullets descended on his position from above. He scrambled for cover but found little. He looked up to see snipers firing down on them from the belltower of San Fernando. “God bless it!” Hall, a moral man, cried out as a bullet hit his left hand. Smith hammered at the roof with his rifle butt, trying to open a hole large enough to escape through.

  Texians gathered under the ceiling of the Veramendi House’s dining room looked up in alarm as plaster began to rain down upon them. Seconds later, Deaf Smith came crashing through the ceiling and landed on the dinner table with a loud thud. Lem Crawford, a recent arrival from South Carolina, cried out, “Jesus Mary, Deef. You ’bout skeered the livin’ shit outen us!”

  Smith was bleeding from a wound in his arm but immediately got up and grabbed a chair. He positioned it under the hole and said, “Help me get Hall off that roof!” Hall was still sitting where Smith had left him, holding his wounded hand in pain, bullets hitting all around him but, miraculously, always missing the mark. Smith said, “Time to come inside, Hall.” Hall looked at him pleasantly, as if Smith had just asked him to join him for lunch. “Oh,” Hall said, “all right, Deef.” Smith put his arms around Hall’s chest and dragged him to the hole in the roof. The other men, reaching upward for him, lowered Hall gently into the room. Smith, although wounded more seriously, climbed back inside under his own power. The experience had been so unnerving that he sat down in a straight-back chair and began to laugh uncontrollably.

  A lone Texian, Henry Karnes, raced across a narrow street leading to the northwest corner of the main plaza, musket balls kicking up eddies of dust around his feet. He leaped through a doorway and rolled into a room where Ben Milam and a dozen other Texians were whaling away at a wall separating them from the next room, using a table leg and an axe to open the hole. Milam heard something. He raised his arm and said, “Hold off a minute!”

  The men stopped chopping. They also heard the chunk! chunk! chunk! of hammering coming from the other side of the wall.

  Colorado Smith grinned and said, “They are trying to get to us, too.”

  Milam nodded. “Let ’em. They can do all the work for us! Now charge your rifles, boys, and stand back . . .”

  Within moments, the wall collapsed. A dozen surprised soldados stood on the other side, blinking through the adobe dust.

  “Get ’em!” Milam shouted.

  The Texians fired a volley, and then charged the room. The Mexicans who did not fall in the volley began hammering away at the attacking Texians using the same tools with which they had just broken through the wall. They fought each other with knives and bayonets, fists and teeth, rocks and broken bottles. The Mexicans were outnumbered and in seconds, they were all dead. Milam dispatched the last one with a quick thrust of his bayonet. The Texians stood in the ruined room, breathless, covered in dust and blood. They had been eager for action, and here it was.

  In the later afternoon, Milam, Maverick, Fannin and Frank Johnson crouched in the courtyard of the Veramendi House. Johnson, kneeling, drew a crude map of Béxar in the dirt. “We have cut the last of them off in the Plaza de Armas down here,” he said, making a mark.

  “So we take the plaza tomorrow morning,” Milam said, “then go after the Alamo.”

  Fannin shook his head. “I would not want to have to charge into all that artillery.”

  Milam turned his spyglass to the fort across the river.

  “If we come at them from all sides,” he said, “and spread out their fire . . .”

  Johnson interrupted, “There are hundreds of men inside those walls. . . .”

  “Starving men,” Milam said. He turned to Maverick and said, “Hey, Sam . . .” The crack of a bullet sounded. Milam looked mildly surprised as blood began to trickle through a neat round hole in his shirt. “Oh Lord,” he said, and slumped to the ground. Another ball hit him in the dead center of his forehead.

  Johnson looked around wildly. He spotted a sniper in a cottonwood. “In the trees!” Johnson shouted. All the Texians raised their rifles and fired a ragged volley. The sniper, hit by three musket balls, dropped from the tree, hit the riverbank and rolled into the river.

  They turned back to Milam. The pool of blood was spreading beneath his head and his sightless eyes stared into the Béxar sky, tinged with the first pink and orange streaks of sunset.

  Ben Milam was buried that night in a hastily dug grave in the courtyard of the Veramendi House, just a few yards from where he had died. There was no time for a proper funeral, but Sam Maverick and Frank Johnson stood for a moment beside the grave.

  Johnson said, “He was like no other.”

  “That, my friend, is an understatement,” Maverick said. “So you are taking his place?”

  Johnson nodded. “I have been elected to step in for Ben.” He smiled. “But no one could really take his place.”

  They were silent for a moment. “Ben once told me a story about when he was a young man in New Orleans,” Maverick said. “For some reason he had worked up some sort of business deal to sell flour to a company in South America. They chartered a ship and laid their hands on God knows how many tons of flour. The skipper of the boat—a man named Zunn
o—was an atheist, a fact that he very loudly proclaimed every chance he got. It made Ben nervous.”

  Johnson laughed softly.

  Maverick said, “Now, Ben was not the most religious man in the world, but in his mind you simply did not start out on a long and dangerous voyage with a man who scoffs in the face of the almighty! That was just poor planning. Ben figured that a seafaring man needed all the help he could get, both natural and supernatural.” Maverick crouched by the grave and patted the dirt. “Well, his other partners in this endeavor thought that Ben was turning a molehill into a mountain, and they reminded him that they all had a very considerable amount of money tied up in this thing—and where he got the money, I would love to learn. Ben never had a dime to his name the entire time that I knew him.”

  “What happened?” Johnson said.

  “Well, sir,” Maverick said, standing up again, “they left New Orleans with this God-hating captain and they began heading south. The voyage was to last several weeks, and before the second week was done, some of the crew began coming down with yellow fever. Next thing you know, more of the crew caught it. They started to drop like flies. Ben told me they were dropping bodies over the side four and five a day. Even the captain died, damning the good Lord from his deathbed. Ben felt that the good Lord had made his point pretty concisely. Well, even Ben got sick. So did all his partners. In fact, he landed in South America with fewer partners than he started off with. Ben was not a cold-hearted man, but he looked upon this as not altogether a bad thing. Fewer partners meant fewer splits in the profits.”

  Johnson said, “And were there any profits?”

  Maverick laughed aloud. “Not a penny! The crew had been cut down by half, the captain was dead and most of the passengers were dying or already dead. That is when the squall hit. For four days and nights, every able-bodied man on the ship fought to keep it afloat. Some of the men who had survived the fever were washed overboard. The ship started taking on water at a prodigious rate. Ben and a few others even readied the lifeboats, expecting it to founder at any moment.

  “But it didn’t. No sir,” Maverick said, “that very unlucky ship managed to limp to shore at some vermin-infested little port. Ben felt very lucky to be alive. But his flour was not so lucky. It was submerged under ten feet of water in the hold of the ship.”

  Now the darkness was almost total around Milam’s grave. Johnson said, “What did Ben do then?”

  “Kept alive as best as he could,” Maverick said, “until he got a job on a ship returning to New Orleans. And that ship ran aground and sank in full view of shore. Ben said he jumped off and walked almost the entire way to safety.”

  Johnson laughed loudly. “Do you think Ben might have exaggerated that story a little?” he said.

  Maverick looked at him and then back down to the grave. “I think it is more likely that Ben understated the facts. He was downright reticent when it came to telling a story.”

  Johnson glanced toward the Alamo. “Look,” he said.

  A small group of men was walking out of the mission’s main gate. One of them held a white flag over his head.

  Maverick said, “Looks like they are ready to parley.” He looked down. “Damn it, Ben, if you had just kept out of the way for another hour . . .”

  Inside the Alamo, Cós stood grim-faced on the walls, watching as his young officer, Colonel José Juan Sanchez-Navarro, walked across the river to Béxar to beg for clemency for his sake. This would ruin him, Cós believed. His army had outnumbered the Texians. They had held the best strategic position. They were well-trained soldiers, while the Texians were nothing but rabble—farmers and slave traders, not fighting men at all. Yet he had lost the mission, lost the city and, it seemed to him, lost the war. General Santa Anna was not a forgiving man. The fact that Cós had married Santa Anna’s sister gave him no preferential treatment at all. In fact, he was convinced that the president was even harder on him than on his other officers, just to avoid any hint of nepotism or favoritism. Or maybe it was simply that Santa Anna hated him, and always had.

  Like any soldier, Cós dreaded defeat. But even more than that, he dreaded reporting the results of this engagement to his brother-in-law.

  Sanchez-Navarro arrived in the camp and was greeted by Juan Seguin. Seguin was a Tejano, born right here in Béxar twenty-nine years earlier. Indeed, his family had been among the founding fathers of the city, and his father, Erasmo, was alcalde—mayor—when Stephen F. Austin made his first visit to San Antonio. The year before, he had been appointed the city’s political chief. But, like many Mexican citizens, Seguin had become more and more concerned about the outrages of Santa Anna’s dictatorship. He raised a company of other Tejanos who were loyal to Texas and bitterly opposed to Santa Anna. Now he, and they, found themselves in the distinctly uncomfortable position of taking a stand against the Centralist government of their homeland, fighting side by side with the rebels, who were mostly Anglos. Many of the Anglos did not trust him because he was Mexican. And many of his own people considered him a traitor. He was aware that some of the men wanted to make Texas a part of the United States. Others wanted the territory to remain a part of Mexico. But Seguin wanted neither. He wanted Texas to be an independent republic with no ties to either country.

  But even though some of the Texians wondered about Seguin’s loyalty, they all had to admit that he was indispensable at times like this: None of the others spoke Spanish as well as he did.

  Sanchez-Navarro saluted Burleson, Johnson, Morris and Fannin at a table near Burleson’s command tent. Burleson indicated that he should sit down. He did, but the others in his company stood behind him.

  He spoke and Seguin turned to the Texians. “The general requests that his men be allowed to carry their arms, with ten rounds per soldier,” he said.

  “Absolutely not! They will lay down their arms!” demanded Johnson.

  Sanchez-Navarro said something else and Seguin turned to the Texians. “It is only to protect themselves against the Comanches on their march.”

  Burleson nodded and said, “And his general promises not to return or engage in any other military action against Texas?”

  Seguin translated, heard the colonel’s reply, and said, “The general will make this promise.”

  Johnson said to Burleson, “You trust him?”

  Burleson nodded toward the Alamo. “Do you want to charge those cannon?”

  The Mexican army under General Martín Perfecto de Cós rode out of San Antonio de Béxar with considerably less pomp than when they rode in. Column after column of forlorn, humiliated troops filed through the plaza past the jeering Texians who had just defeated them, as the bell in the tower of the San Fernando church rang out peals of victory.

  Captain Juan Seguin sat astride his horse, watching the scene with decidedly mixed emotions.

  A local merchant, Don José Palaez, drew up alongside Seguin in a horse-drawn cart. “Will they return?” Palaez asked.

  “No,” Seguin said. “General Cós gave his word.”

  The man in the cart gave a short, bitter laugh. “When I heard that the Mexicans surrendered,” he said, “I did not believe it. How did the bastards accomplish this?”

  Seguin did not look at him, but continued staring forward at the defeated troops. “With our hearts,” he said.

  At the edge of town, a number of Texians watched the Mexican troops file past. Though members of the victorious army, only a few of these observers were in uniforms, of sorts. The New Orleans Greys had been formed in Louisiana a few months ago with the express purpose of fighting for Texas against Santa Anna. Their dress was not military, exactly, but their “uniforms” were at least close enough in design and color to make them appear to be a unit. They wore matching gray jackets and large caps with puffy, oversized bells and black visors. There were only a hundred Greys in all, but today, having turned back an army of over a thousand, they felt like great warriors indeed.

  Some of them could not help chiding the Mexicans a
s they passed.

  “Loosianna just whipped your arse!” jeered a rifleman named Boldt.

  Another, a skinny private called Jaxon, laughed and shouted, “No, Kentucky just whipped your arse!”

  A third, Logan, yelled, “Wrong, gentlemen! Tennessee just whipped your arse!” He turned to the group and called out gleefully, “Sant’anna sends ’em here, we send ’em back!”

  “Yer lucky we let you keep your muskets,” shouted another Grey, a recent immigrant named Dubravsky. “Should just let the savages swallow you whole!”

  Gagliasso, a former member of the Italian navy, tossed a pebble after the Mexicans, catcalling, “Now scat, and don’t come back!”

  Several of the men spat in the direction of the army. General Cós saw this and hesitated for a moment, staring at the men and trying to retain some shred of pride. Then, with a sigh, he rode on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  To Jesús Montoya, his grandfather’s farm was both heaven and hell. Rugged and remote, the little jacal they shared was far from the luxuries and enticements of San Antonio de Béxar. They had gone there once, to sell a flock of goats, and Jesús had been mesmerized by the sights, the smells, the colors, the splendor of the huge city. At least, it seemed splendid and huge to Jesús; the largest town he had ever seen before then was a haphazard collection of one store, one saloon and five small houses. In contrast Béxar seemed, to his eyes, like a metropolis. It was dazzling.

  As were the señoritas. What few women and girls Jesús ever encountered in their tiny village were sturdy, coarse and plain, made older than their years by ceaseless back-breaking, spirit-annihilating labor. But in Béxar, Jesús had seen women who were fresh and smooth, dressed in beautiful skirts and wrapped in shawls into which were woven all the colors of the rainbow. They did not smell of earth and sweat but of flowers and fruits, and strange, alluring perfumes.

  Jesús longed for those women, as fragile and lovely as the painted figurines of the Virgin at the little adobe church in his village. Even more, he longed for travel, for adventure. He wanted to see beyond even Béxar, to drink a long, soothing draught of freedom.