The worst that I have done was to my beloved mother. By getting myself maimed. But more in regard to her love of Señor Riley. Listen:
While I was mending, Señor Riley and the other San Patricios who were not executed were moved from the prison in Mexico City to one from which escape would be more difficult.
For, yes, one had escaped from Acordada Prison! He was one who left in women’s clothes, in the midst of a group of Mexican women who had come to bring them gifts. Did you never read of that? He was a small man for an Irish soldier, and they dressed him in articles of their clothing, and walked out with him past the guards. My dear mother was among that group. Of course they could not have smuggled Señor Riley out that way. He was too big. Too much an object of the army’s diligence. And they never unchained him, not even when visitors came.
After the escape, they removed the prisoners from Acordada Prison up to the castle of Chapultepec. The very place where I was shot and put to the bayonet, that corridor of death, that is where they put the San Patricios then. All the while, the people and the press of Mexico clamored for mercy and amnesty for those heroes. General Santa Anna kept trying to bargain for their freedom.
You remember, I have mentioned to you certain papers I have, that were written by querido Riley, while he was in prison, and after. That they were among my mother’s possessions. When I mentioned them, you became very alert.
His letters are in this satchel. They are my treasure, a part of what I always carry with me when I make this penitencia. Remember, I showed you one he was writing to entice deserters.
I am ready to show you the rest of them. Come. You can sit on that bench. And as is so often the case, I am thirsty as well as pained and tired. I am so glad my Yanqui journalist loves a bottle, too.
A Yanqui journalist before you, a few years ago, offered to pay me a large sum for these letters. I said no. Nor would I sell them to you.
Someday I must ask a priest whether it is acceptable to sip refreshment from a Yanqui journalist’s flask while on a penitencia! No, I won’t ask, because I do not like the answer I expect him to make. It is very painful to crawl on these poor stumps, so many miles over the stones and cobbles. These wounds have hurt me through all the years since that war. The pain and misery are more bearable if I am borracho.
And if it is wrong to make this penance drunk, then I shall atone for it on my next penance. As I say, this can continue as long as I live! Ha! As it should! For who is ever free of guilt?
The page you hold there is the draft of a letter that Señor Riley wrote while he was still in prison. It was my mother who took paper and pencil to him in prison, and on later visits smuggled out his letters. That is a fragment that I believe he used in several letters of appeal.
In the month of April 1846, listening only to the advice of my conscience for the liberty of a people who had war brought upon them by the most unjust aggression, I separated myself from the North American forces. Since then I have served constantly for Mexico. I participated in the action at Matamoros, where I formed a company of 48 Irishmen. In Monterrey I did the same, with another company of Mexicans also. I fought at Buena Vista with 89 Irishmen; with them and more I was at Cerro Gordo; at Churubusco I presented myself with 142 Irishmen, all gathered by me. There I was injured and taken prisoner, and my treatment by the American government is well known, indeed, notorious, having received 59 whip lashes and two brand marks on my face, which will always remind me of what I have suffered for the Mexicans.
—John Riley,
A native of Galway, Ireland
Think of it, Señor Periodista, as you read the names of those battles! He was in every terrible battle except that of Chapultepec. And in each, he inflicted the greatest punishment on the invaders. Of course you sought ultimate revenge against a soldier who laid so many Yanquis low. But it was a grave injustice to torture and disgrace an honorable soldier, to brand him a traitor against your nation. He never was a citizen of your nation! He did desert your army in good conscience. A soldier is a mature man. He is responsible for his deeds. Even an obedient soldier should disobey an order that is repellent to his conscience and his faith! Officers, of course, would challenge that.
Once, Señor Riley told my Tío Rodrigo, and my mother, that if he had continued to serve the United States in its invasion of Catholic Mexico, he would have been bound to spend the rest of his life crawling on his knees in penitence on the stony road to Guadalupe. He said he owed no repentance to the United States, which was never his country.
Now, that scrap you hold there was a letter he was writing to the English ambassador. He asked for a loan of four hundred dollars to send for the support of his son in Ireland, due to the impoverished condition of that country. You see he promises to repay the ambassador at fifty dollars each month. The request was in vain, of course.
It touches me still, Señor, when I remember that plea. To think that he had a son in Ireland. That he had left his son there years before, to earn the pay of a soldier in the British army, because of the poverty of his native land! By the time he was serving Mexico, his son was old enough to write a letter to him begging help! God knows how that letter followed him to Mexico. Perhaps the newspapers in Ireland had written of the San Patricios in the war. Surely they had. I thought much of that boy in Ireland, as I lay recovering. I imagined him as I thought a son of Señor Riley might look after growing up too impoverished to get good food. I felt brotherly toward him, as if his father should have been my father also. I wanted to help him.
My dear mother, and my Tío Rodrigo, were little able to help because after the Yanquis took Mexico City, everyone here was without the usual resources. My uncle’s military pension had vanished early in the war. Mexico’s wealth had all been expended in the defense. When I was at last taken home from hospital, my mother was in shame and distress because there was no food to feed me, some days. She would go out to her society of women, and they would go everywhere to glean food, or pesos for food. They would bring only harina de maíz to their families. They would bake tortilla francesa for the San Patricios in the army prison. Some of the newspapers in the city tried to raise money for the aid of the San Patricios and their families, in gratitude for their heroic patriotism for Mexico. Some of them had married Mexican women, before the last battles. Others’ families were still in Ireland. In both countries, of course, poverty was enormous. Poverty is of course the history of both countries, as it has been since the first plunderers arrived. In my country, the conquistadors. In Ireland, the British landlords, eh? And of course our church helped keep us poor.
For a while after the surrender of Mexico City, your soldiers were a scourge here. They drank and looted. A woman was not safe. My mother was followed and insulted often. One day a drunken sergeant stalked her to our very door. When she shut him out, he forced the door open. He found her standing at the foot of my bed with a pistol aimed at his eyes. In English I cried, “Look, Sergeant!” I threw aside the bedcover, showing him my scarred stumps, which were still very hideous. I told him, “My mother wants to avenge what you have done to me!” He heard her cock the hammer of the pistol, and he departed our house so recklessly that he lost his hat. We kept it as a trofeo.
After the peace treaty, when Señor Riley was released and came to live with us, he liked to put the hat on the floor upside down and pretend it was a spitoon. It was during those times, Señor, that he wrote many of the papers you see in that packet. He returned to the Mexican army, but it was a defeated army. Our General Santa Anna was in exile again, and the Supreme Court Justice Peña y Peña was the leader of Mexico. Most of the time Señor Riley was with us, he wrote petitions seeking pay for his surviving San Patricios, and the land grants Mexico had promised them.
Those were very sad months, Señor. Eventually your General Scott brought your soldiers under some discipline, but we were eager for you to go home. The price we paid for sending you home to your United States was the northern half of our nation: the rest of Texa
s, to California and everything between. Our nation was heartsick and angry. Many wanted to resume the war and drive you out. But we were weak.
It was sad in our house, also. When Señor Riley was released from the prison with his remaining San Patricios, their heads were shaved again with nicked, dull razors. The brands on their cheekbones were still red and ugly. Army musicians played “The Rogue’s March” as they came out of the prison. My mother was there with a bundle for Señor Riley, and my uncle had brought a fine horse. The bundle was the dress coat of Señor Riley’s uniform of a major of artillery, with all its embroidery and epaulets and his medals for valor, and his kepi hat with braid and shiny bill. In the presence of his former jailers he donned the coat over his grimy rags, put on the kepi, mounted the steed, and rode away looking splendid, his back braced. I had been brought to the place in a carriage in order that I might see him set free. I shall never forget that moment. His captors, who had never been able to kill him through battle, torture, or neglect, were chagrined, for he was free of them at last, and in that fine Mexican army coat!
But all became bittersweet when he came to live with us. His pride and shame were intermixed with my mother’s pride and shame, and their great love for each other was no longer simple. He thought he had been made too ugly by the brands on his face. He grew his hair long to hide them, and he wanted us never to see the welts on his back. Though he had borne them without shame, he knew they were estigmas. She tried to give them the balm of her fingertips, with tears in her eyes she did that. But he misunderstood the tears, and soon he asked her not to touch the scars. That was the first time I knew his words to make her wince.
He also felt that he was bringing her shame by living in the house with her, unmarried. And he was embarrassed that I lay in one bed aware that they lay in the other. He could not comprehend how complete our love for him really was. Sometimes he would try very hard to be merry and gallant. He danced well and sang with a pleasing voice, Irish-language songs that we did not understand but found beautiful. He was touched when his soldiers would come to see him, but if they wanted to drink, as Irishmen do, he made them go away.
But he put more and more of his attention to the welfare of his old comrades, and less to my mother and me. He went among the influential people and called upon them to help him pay his Irish patriots. He wrote constantly when he was at the house. Our trophy hat of the Yanqui sergeant then sat on his desk as a pen and pencil receptacle.
My mother tried so hard to seem strong and cheerful, but she was failing within. She wanted him to resign from the army, but he said soldiering was the only profession he knew, and that he was very good at it. He wanted to be called back to active duty because his soldiers in their idleness were getting into drunken disorders, and he had to work all the harder to get them out. He could still be heard, because he and the other San Patricios were as yet beloved by the Mexican people.
At last in the summer of 1848 his orders came to rebuild and command the San Patricios battalion, and he was promoted to coronel. The new president of Mexico was General Herrera, who had been the acting president before the war, and he was was a strong admirer of the Irishmen. Though the war with your country was over, a government still needed an army. Particularly so as its president was a general whose political enemy was also a general who had also been a president, General Paredes. My mother was grieved that her querido was leaving our house, but also I think relieved. He left these papers and his few belongings to assure us he was not abandoning us. When the army began paying him, he would marry her and support us.
¡Ay de mi! He was not out of our house a month before General Paredes attempted a coup, which was thwarted by President Herrera. Because a San Patricio officer was under suspicion, Coronel Riley was also suspect. He was arrested and put into a military prison at Santiago Tlatelolco. A rumor ran abroad that he was to be shot. We heard it from a woman who was betrothed to an Irish soldier. She ran to our house in the night, distraught, and told my mother. My mother, though pale and trembling, comforted the woman until she could leave. Then she came and sat on the side of my bed to hold my hand.
Surely you can imagine our distress! What to do? I urged her to go to Tío Rodrigo at once and tell him, in hopes that he could confirm the rumor, or disprove it, or intervene somehow. She promised me she would. Then she prayed with me and told me to use the chamberpot while she was there to help me up. I did. When I was back in bed she told me to go to sleep. She reached to the chest where we kept the pistol and she got it. I asked her why she was taking the pistol. She said to be protected when she went through the streets to Tío Rodrigo’s. I was alarmed. I felt she was misleading me.
So then I suggested she should instead go next door and have the neighbor and his son take her in their carriage to Tío Rodrigo’s house. She said it was a good suggestion. Then she kissed me and told me to try to sleep. I said, no, I could not sleep because of this, and I said I wanted to get up and ride with her to Tío Rodrigo’s house. No, she told me, she must hurry. Then I said, If the neighbors take you, you can leave the pistol with me. No, she told me. Go to sleep, niño.
She shut the door, and I lay in darkness. I listened for her to go out, but did not hear her go. Faintly I heard her doing something near the desk. I heard paper rustling. I thought, I should get out of this bed and make my way to her, because she is not acting right. But I was inert with dread of being scolded. Also I was afraid that I would find her doing something that I wouldn’t like. I began to fear that if I made the effort to go to the door and open it I would find she had written a farewell and would be sitting there with the pistol aimed at her own temple. I was terrified to find such a spectacle. Instead I lay praying that it was not happening. I prayed so diligently that I forgot about listening for a pistol shot, or the closing of a door. I said avemarias over and over and then I would think that I should be listening for a gunshot, and sometimes I was confused, whether it would be a gunshot executing Señor Riley or the gunshot of my mother executing herself. Then the avemarias again, with my heart aching, and I went to sleep trying to say avemarias and count them at the same time in my head without the rosary.
I was awakened by the iron rims of cart wheels on the street outside and it was becoming daylight, and outside the window a mockingbird was singing a funeral march. There was no sound in the house. I got down out of the bed and crawled on my two hands and a hip toward the door. At that time my stumps were not healed enough for me to crawl on them. In the very dim room I reached up to the door latch and when I opened the door she was lying on the floor beside the desk. The floor was sticky with blood. She was cold. Instead of shooting herself she had cut the veins in her wrist with Señor Riley’s old razor, the one he had kept in the trophy soldier hat to sharpen pencils and quill pens. The pistol was on the desk lying on a sheet of paper. But upon it she had written no farewell.
Tío Rodrigo found us, when he came to tell us that the rumor was false. Coronel Riley had not been sentenced to die at all.
This flask of yours is almost empty, Señor. Before you go to find us something else to drink, I will tell you that of my many reasons for penitence, the first is that I lay in bed all that night a coward, her son, who could have, por lo menos, summoned a priest for los últimos sacramentos.
I suppose that is the end of my story. May I hope you believe it? You have been kind to bear with me, with my cruel and cynical way of making you obtain it. You have done penitence with me, coming along so slowly, swallowing my insults. You have done some sort of penance for your nation, for what it did to Mexico. Now I invite you to enter the cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe with me.
Before we make our tipsy way across the plaza, let me show you the piece of paper that I found under the pistol on the desk that night, as if the pistol had been a paperweight.
You see that the only marks she put upon it were these little specks of blood from her wrist.
But on the other side you see that this sheet of paper had been used be
fore. On it is the handwriting of Señor Riley, in pencil. We did not have enough paper to waste it. If she had written her farewell, it would have been on a sheet of paper that he had already used to compose a statement. I believe my mother was reading it as she decided to cut herself.
Please turn it over and read it, Señor.
I have had the honour of fighting in all the battles that Mexico has had with the United States.
There is no more hospitable and friendly a people on the face of the earth, toward a foreigner, and a Catholic Irishman, than the Mexicans.
I grieve at the deaths of fifty of my best and bravest men who have been hung by the Americans for no other reason than fighting manfully against them. Especially my first Lieutenant Patrick Dalton, from the County of Mayo. His loss I most deeply regret.
Though in the service of Mexico, the banner under which we fought so bravely was that Glorious Emblem of native rights, the banner which should have floated over our native soil many years ago, it was St. Patrick, the Harp of Erin, the Shamrock upon a green field.
EPILOGUE
St. Patrick Battalion Page 30