James Burke - Two for Texas

“Where the hell you been?” Deaf said.

“Trying to slip a pig-string on Santa Anna.”

Houston’s horse had five rifle holes in it, and there was a tear in his trousers and a long area of scarlet that ran down his leg.

“General, you’re bleeding like a stuck hog,” Hugh said.

“Move on the trees, boys. They’re almost finished.”

Then his horse collapsed under him. Deaf and Son were immediately on each side of him with their hands under his arms. They pulled him to his feet, and he held his leg stiffly off the ground as though it were set with a splint.

“Get me another horse and attack. Don’t waver now. The field is ours.”

Corporal Burnett, whose face was burned and puckered from a powder flash, brought up another horse, and they helped Houston into the stirrup.

“Set this one out, Sam. We’ll push them into the water in fifteen minutes,” Deaf said.

“Form to me! Form to me!” Houston shouted, waving his hat at the mounted men and infantry on each side of him. “Run them to the bayou, boys. They’re too frightened to shoot straight now.”

Then he whipped his hat on the horse’s rump, and the line charged forward toward the trees. Son felt his shirt jump, and he looked down and saw a hole where a ball had passed through the cloth just above his old wound. Deaf was waving a Mexican broadsword over his head as though he were generating enough energy in his arm to fell a tree with a single stroke. Hugh was already firing his Colt, the explosions and splintered lead from the chambers singeing the hair on his horse’s head. Just as they crashed through the underbrush on the edge of the trees, the Mexicans who still had loaded guns fired their last volley and ran for the bayou. A Mexican corporal was stumbling backward from Son, stabbing frantically at the horse with his bayonet. Son stood in the stirrups and fired downward, and the ball splintered the man’s rifle stock apart in his hands and left him open-mouthed and atrophied with fear until Son’s horse knocked him reeling into a tree.

The Mexicans who were not bayoneted or clubbed to the ground in the woods ran down the muddy bank of the bayou, splashed through the shallows, then fell suddenly into deep water where they thrashed their arms wildly against the pull of their bandoliers and tight jackets. Then the Texians emerged from the tree and took aim.

“Give quarter!” Houston shouted. “They’re quit.”

The soldiers lowered their rifles and looked back at him.

“Some of them out there is zapadores, General. They was at Bexar,” one man said.

“They’re now our prisoners,” Houston said. “Deaf, ride to Vince’s Bridge and give my order.”

“They’re going to be hard to stop, Sam.”

“The order is to give quarter to all who lay down their arms.”

“Tell them they better stop wasting shot on these assholes and catch that sonofabitch Santa Anna,” Hugh said.

The Mexicans in the bayou were told in Spanish to wade ashore. Their eyes were wide with fright, and some of the Texians repeatedly cocked the hammers of their rifles. Deaf rode off toward the firing that still came from Vince’s Bridge. The Texians picked up the Mexican weapons that were scattered through the woods and marched their prisoners into the field. Son and Hugh were in the rear, and a soldier in deerskin clothes with a Mexican sword in his belt walked beside them. He was looking ahead at Houston and chewing on a small twig in his mouth.

“I wonder if I ought to tell the general about it,” he said.

“About what?” Son said.

“I killed a fellow back there that don’t seem to belong here.”

“Get that stick out of your mouth and make sense,” Hugh said.

“He wasn’t no soldier. Maybe he was a spy. I didn’t have time to pull out his pockets. A Mexican come out from behind a tree and liked to took my head off with a rock.”

“Show him to us,” Son said.

“We’re going to get separated from the others. This woods is still full of half-crazy Mexicans.”

“You can ride up with me. Where’s he at?” Son said.

The soldier led them back through the trees to the bayou. They saw the pantalooned legs of a man sticking out from behind a willow tree toward the water’s edge. The man was seated upright against the trunk, his round head cleaved nearly in two. One palm was turned upward on his thigh like a gargoyle’s claw, and his index finger was pointed outward in the same direction as his empty eyes. A cap and ball pistol lay by his foot.

As Son looked at the destroyed face, he also saw the face of the brother strangling above the chain that twisted into his throat.

“I run up on him out of the brush, and when I seen he wasn’t no soldier I was going to tell him to lay down on his stomach. But he come up with a pistol, and I slit his skull. You reckon I ought to tell Deaf or the general?”

“He don’t mean nothing to nobody now. We done whupped them,” Hugh said.

“What’d you want to see him for, then?”

“You might have had Santa Anna there, boy,” Hugh said. “But this ain’t him. I seen Santa Anna myself once. He looks like a frog. This fellow was probably some kind of spy.”

They rode back out of the trees into the field. The wind was blowing stronger now, and the acrid smell of the battle had dissipated in the cool afternoon air The sunlight glinted on the brass of the six-pounders against the green of the woods where the attack had begun, and a Texian flag was flapping on top of the Mexican breastworks. Toward Vince’s Bridge they could see a long column of prisoners being marched back to the Mexican camp. Suddenly, Son realized how thirsty he was, but when he reached for the canteen that had been tied to the back of his saddle he saw that the strap had been cut.

“Take mine,” the soldier on the horse’s rump said.

Son pulled the wood plug from the canteen and drank until the water poured from his lips.

“You drink like that was whiskey,” the soldier said.

The water ran down his chin and neck and over his dusty chest, and as he lifted the canteen higher he thought he could see the whole landscape, the breastworks, the blackened crater where the Mexican cannon had been, the ground strewn with dead men and horses, the violent green of the trees in the distance tilt upward into the shimmering sky, as though it all were being pulled over the earth’s edge.

The Texians refused to bury the Mexican dead. Their bodies swelled and blackened under the sun, their distended stomachs bursting the buttons on their uniforms, and at night wild hogs came out of the woods and tore them apart.

On the day after the battle three Texas soldiers chasing a deer found a terrified Mexican in civilian clothes hiding in a canebrake by the bayou. He wept and kissed the hand of the sergeant who captured him and said that he was a private in the army of Santa Anna. When the soldiers took him back to Houston’s camp the other Mexican prisoners rose to their feet and began to call out “El presidente.” Within minutes a mob of Texians, some carrying coiled ropes, formed around the oak tree where Santa Anna stood shaking before Houston, who lay propped against the tree trunk with his wounded leg held stiffly out in front of him. One man who had escaped execution at Goliad was already tying a hangman’s knot in his rope.

But Houston addressed Santa Anna as an equal and had his surgeon give him a piece of opium to hold in his cheek. The language between the two was that of diplomat and negotiator, and Houston even restrained his temper when Santa Anna denied responsibility for the murder of James Fannin and his soldiers at Goliad. The battles, massacres, and burning of towns from Bexar to the San Jacinto River seemed to be slipping away into an abstraction in front of the men who had survived them. As Son and Hugh looked at the muted anger of the other soldiers, dripping weapons in their animal-skin clothes, their wind-burned faces reheated and caught forever with an unsatiated revenge, they felt that a fierce collective spirit even greater than the war it had created to sustain itself was ending here, unfairly, too soon, in the breathless and humid air.