James Burke - Two for Texas

“The way things are now, you either got to get in the army or have the Mexicans shooting at you half the time, anyway,” Hugh said.

Son looked directly at the general’s eyes and saw that the words never touched inside. “We heared you was giving six hundred and forty acres to any soldier that would stick it out to the end,” he said.

“You can get more than that from the Mexicans just by signing an oath of allegiance to Mexico City,” Houston said.

“We wouldn’t do nothing like that,” Hugh said. “I fought under Andy Jackson at New Orleans, just like you done at Horseshoe Bend. We wouldn’t never support no tyrant like Santa Anna.”

“I see you have one of Sam Colt’s revolvers. How do you like it?” The voice was disarming, a relaxation like a flame being taken away from wax.

“It’s a hell of a pistol, General. When I traded for it over at Jack Tyler’s I thought I’d be safer in front of it than behind it because everything Jack trades is junk. His beer is so bad you just as lief pour it on the ground without bothering to run it through your pipes.” Hugh’s words were coming too fast, and there was a fine wire of strain in his voice. Son couldn’t believe it. “Then my partner and me got jumped by three slave hunters this side of the Trinity, and I snapped off two shots at them fellows before they—”

“One of my officers, Sam Walker, has a Colt. I wish I had a few more of them. Why did these slave hunters jump you?”

Hugh looked blankly back at him and fingered the damp edge of his coat.

“They was fixing to rob us,” he said.

“It’s strange that three slave hunters would attack two armed white men when they could make more profit and have less trouble with runaway Negroes.”

“General, them men was after us because we’re escaped convicts from Louisiana,” Son said. “We killed a guard over there, and his brother has got two hundred dollars on each of our heads. He’s been running us all over Texas, and he liked to got us a few weeks back on the Brazos. He had a bunch of Mexicans with him, too, because we raided a Mexican horse pen with the Indians just after we come across the Sabine.”

“Did you have to kill that guard?”

“I can’t answer that one too good to myself,” Son said.

“How well do you shoot that Kentucky?” Houston asked.

“As good as the next man. We ain’t gone hungry for camp meat with it.”

“What else have you done with it?”

“Sir?”

“You didn’t kill that guard in Louisiana with it. Can you kill a Mexican with it?”

“I dropped one of them slave hunters, General.”

Houston picked up a carpet bag from under the table and took out two printed enlistment forms. They were worded in the grandiloquent language of a man who had memorized hundreds of passages from the Iliad and Odysseey while living among the Cherokees:

We pledge to rally to the standard against the usurper of the South and all those who deny the rights of freeborn men. With valor and our faith in God we will not desist until the violators of our homes and farms are driven forever from the soil of the Republic. The justice of our cause will be evidenced by the gallantry and spirit with which we serve it. Our birthright and country will be maintained, or we will perish in defense of it.

___________________

His signature or mark

Hugh made his mark on the line, and Son labored carefully with the quill until he had drawn his full name.

“When do we start kicking some Mexican butt, General?” Hugh said.

“That depends on many things, gentlemen. But now you should go back with Corporal Burnett and build a lean-to for yourselves,” he said.

“Sir, one other thing. Do you know where Jim Bowie is at?” Hugh said.

“He’s in Bexar. Do you know him?”

“Hell, yes. We drunk and played cards together many a time in New Orleans.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He’s meaner than piss boiling in a pot when he’s mad. I seen him tear up a public house once after somebody stole his purse. He run eight men through a window before he found the one that done it.”

Houston laughed out loud.

“That sounds very much like Jim in his cups,” Houston said. “I’m very glad to have you gentlemen on our side.”

He said it with genuine warmth, and both Hugh and Son pulled back their shoulders just a little.

For the next two months their life in the army involved almost everything in a soldier’s experience except fighting a war. They sawed firewood and hauled water, built earthen works, dug latrines and filled them in again. Each morning after muster they marched four hours back and forth in the open field next to the woods and practiced firing in staggered volley lines, snapping their hammers on empty flash pans and cap holes and aiming at a distant grove of live oaks. The ennui became contagious among them. Half the time they were not listening when their noncommissioned officers shouted drill instructions at them, and they stepped on each other’s heels and collided into the man in front when someone didn’t hear the order to halt. The idea of taking orders from men like themselves was a contradiction in their minds, a violation of the politics that brought them into the army in the first place: to rid their community of a tyrannical authority that made their lives wretched.

Also, the noncommissioned officers had little if any more experience in the army than the enlisted men. Often they argued among themselves in front of their men and sometimes devised training plans that turned into a carnival at their own expense, such as the time that Corporal Burnett sent forty men on a wide circle through a woods and forgot to tell them what to do when they got there. When he found them that afternoon half of them were drunk and sick on green tequila they had bought off a traveling Mexican liquor supplier.

Of the enlisted men who talked back to the noncommissioned officers and complained incessantly, Hugh was the worst. He yawned loudly and belched during muster, drove the wood wagon over a corporal’s foot, shot at a deer when he was standing picket and aroused the whole camp, got drunk whenever he could buy tequila, broke wind deliberately while at attention, and always offered advice about a better way to do something. One morning during drill Corporal Burnett had them form into a defensive square in the middle of the field and kneel in a firing position.

“All right, this is what is called the ‘British square,’” he said. “You use it when you get caught out in the open and you ain’t got no cover. As long as you hold the square nobody can fire on your back or your flank.”

“It’s real good for keeping everybody in one place so a cannon ball can wipe out half of them, too,” Hugh said.

“What?”

“When we pushed the redcoats back to the Gulf at Chalmette, they went into squares all over the field. Our eight-pounders blowed guts and brains into the tops of the trees. I think they done the same thing in the Revolution, too.”

“You start tonight on another latrine, Allison.”

“I’m just telling you and these other boys what that square’s worth. You try to fight the Mexicans anywhere in the open and they’ll shove that musket up your butt sideways. General Sam knows that. Why the hell you think we cut bait anytime there’s Mexicans a day’s ride away? This war ain’t going to get won fighting like no redcoats.”

The corporal was furious, but he couldn’t argue with Hugh’s experience, and he also knew that the general had no plans to engage the enemy in any kind of open, or worse, enclave situation.

“Fall out, Allison, and get started on that latrine now,” he said. “When I get back to camp I’m going to see if I can’t do something permanent about you.”