In the Rogue Blood (23 page)

O
n a warm forenoon of pale and cloudless sky they arrived at the Río Grande, known to the Mexicans as the Rio Bravo del Norte. Taylor’s scouts had reported that the town of Matamoros, positioned on the south bank of the river and about twenty-five miles inland from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, was fortified by a small Mexican garrison. The river along that stretch was eighty yards wide and the Mexicans had confiscated every boat to be found and taken them all to their side and posted sentinels for miles along the riverbank east and west of town.

After sending a detachment to secure Point Isabel on the Gulf as the landing point for his seaborne supplies, Taylor chose to give the Mexicans a show. He marched his troops upstream along the north bank and hove into view of Matamoros with regimental bands blaring and colors popping
in the breeze. He halted the troops in a wide clearing and rode with his staff officers to the crest of a bluff affording an excellent view of the river in both directions and of Matamoros across the way. The river was the color of buckskin and its banks were lined with cattails except along the Matamoros riverfront and its opposite shore where the ferry had operated before the Mexicans dismantled it on learning of Taylor’s approach. There were hardwood stands upriver and down along both banks and cotton fields shone in the distance on the Mexican side.

A crowd of townspeople had assembled on the Matamoros bank to gape at the Americans. In the midst of them was a troop of lancers sitting their handsome mounts and resplendent in green tunics with crimson sashes and tall black shakos with horsehair plumes. Alongside them an army band played rousing patriotic tunes hard and loud in competition with the strains of the Yankee musicians. Commanding the lancers was a major who now stood in the stirrups and brandished his saber at the invaders and addressed them loudly and at length in eloquent Spanish which Taylor’s interpreter translated as a directive to the Yankees to go home or die.

As soon as the major had done with his address, the crowd started in with cursing and shaking their fists and the boys among them threw stones which all fell short in the water. The Americans in the ranks swore back at the Mexicans in explicitly profane terms. The cacophony of martial music and bilingual damnations shook the skies while Taylor conferred with his advisors about defensive positions.

John and Riley had by now been relieved of their gags but they had fourteen days more to carry ball and chain. When Master Sergeant Kaufmann went striding past them Riley called out, “Say now, sergeant, what if that fancy Mex cavalry comes charging across the river, eh? How are me and Johnny here to fight if we’re chained down by these damn cannonballs?” Kaufmann gave him the barest glance and went on without a word. Riley looked at John and said, “I have prayed to the good Lord to let me have but five minutes alone with that son of a bitch, just five minutes to set things right with him and I can die a happy man.”

“You best pray I dont beat you to him,” John said.

The Mexican major now barked orders to his troop and the lancers reined their horses around and the unit trotted off in smart formation down the dusty street and back toward the garrison. The band marched along after, still playing as it went, its volume falling fainter as it moved away from the river. A moment later the only Mexicans still in evidence on the other shore were the sentinels and a few lingering civilians.

While diplomatic efforts to avoid war continued between Washington and Mexico City, Taylor was under orders to stay in place and take no hostile action except in response to Mexican attack. Rumors were rife, the most common of them that the Mexicans across the river were waiting only for the arrival of several more regiments before making their charge. Against that possibility Taylor ordered work to begin immediately on an earthen defense work to be called Fort Texas. It was positioned on the bluff and would have five sides. Its outer walls would be nine feet high and fifteen feet thick. Toward its construction each regiment provided daily labor in the form of rotating fatigue details, and as compensation each man on the detail received a gill of whiskey at the end of the day’s work. Required to work with the construction crews every day but denied the whiskey allowance were all men under punishment, including John Little and Jack Riley, who had to labor with ball and chain. They fetched and carried materials and tools, mixed buckets of mud mortar, applied pick and shovel, and all the while cursed the army that treated them less like soldiers than as beasts of burden.

Lucas Malone volunteered for the labor detail at every opportunity and so on most days found himself working in proximity to John and Riley. John introduced Lucas and Handsome Jack to each other one sultry afternoon when they were all shoveling construction debris into wheelbarrows along the fort’s south wall. Thunderheads were rising like bloodstained purple towers over the Gulf and the sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses of Matamoros. Riley asked what part of Ireland his family was from. Lucas said County Galway and Riley grinned widely. “But that’s me
birthplace
, man! Some Malones lived a few miles north of us. Could they have been kin?” Lucas said they might have been but he couldn’t be sure. They’d had lots of Malone kin in the old country but his granddaddy had fled the sod after killing a man in a donnybrook. He’d kept on running after reaching New York and didn’t stop until he made Tennessee.

Riley asked Lucas why he volunteered for the labor gang. “Bad enough to have to do this as punishment,” he said.

“Because I’d anytime ruther work like a man,” said Lucas, “than march around on a drill field playin at being a soldier. March and drill, drill and march. That’s all we do in this fuckin army camp.”

“Dont be calling it an army camp,” Riley said. “It’s a bloody prison is what it is.”

Remembering the city prison in New Orleans, John thought Handsome Jack was wrong about that. “Hell Jack, it’s only another seven days with these ornaments on our legs,” he said.

“Only seven days left
this
time,” Riley said. “Then comes the
next
time, and maybe we’ll wear them sixty days, or ninety. Maybe next time it’ll be the fucking yoke for a month or so. Maybe it’ll be the bloody lash. These bastards can do any damn …
hello
, what’s this?”

Their comrades were flocking to the riverside in high commotion, hollering and cheering and waving their hats. A dozen young women, all of them with long black hair and red laughing mouths, had come to the riverbank and there disrobed completely and entered the river to their brown thighs and now were busily soaping themselves and each other and blowing kisses the while to the cheering Americans across the way. Behind them a squad of Mexican soldiers stood at the water’s edge with their rifles unslung and held the girls’ clothes and pointed across to the Americans and laughed and said things to the women and quickly back-stepped grinning when the girls splashed water at them. Some of the Americans removed their boots and walked partway into the river and called for the women to come over to their side. The women laughed and splashed water in their direction and jumped up and down so that their dark-nippled breasts jounced the more. They soaped each other’s gleaming buttocks and threw their heads back and rounded their mouths in mock orgasmic delight as they worked a thick soapy lather into the hairy patches between their legs. The Americans were howling like penned dogs.

“Sweet Jesus,” Riley said with a grin, “I been struck mad by the bleeding sun, I have.”

Lucas laughed at the happy vision of all that lovely female nakedness in the bright sunlight. He clapped John on the shoulder and pointed to one girl after another. “Look there at
her
, Johnny—right over
there!
Oh, and
that
one, over there, with the bush big as a beaver. You
see
her? God
damn!
”

Now officers had arrived on the scene with sabers in hand and were shoving their way to the forefront of the crowd of soldiers. The girls were
beckoning to the Americans and cupping their pretty breasts to them and calling endearments to them in Spanish. And now some of the Americans had waded out to the river’s depths and begun swimming for the other side and the officers ran into the water to their knees and commanded them to turn back immediately. Some of them did but several swam on and midway across the river one of them began to thrash wildly and quite abruptly sank from sight and his body would be found the next day caught against the bank on a tree root at a point more than twenty miles downstream near the mouth of the river.

Three made it across to the shallows opposite and one of them might yet have drowned even then except several off the girls came out and helped him to his feet. The other two Yankees were also helped to wade out onto the bank in their dripping pants. They all three looked back at their cheering comrades and waved and hugged naked girls to them and patted the girls’ haunches and buttocks and squeezed their breasts. The girls playfully slapped away their hands and now hurried back into their clothes as the Americans kept at kissing and fondling them the while. The Mexican soldiers laughed and shook the Americans’ hands and patted their backs in the manner of old friends. Again dressed in their loose cotton skirts and lowcut sleeveless blouses the girls put their arms around the necks of the American soldiers and the Americans stroked their hips and all of them walked away laughing together down the street and around a corner and out of sight.

A half-dozen officers now stood in the shallows on this side of the river with pistols in hand and commanded the men away from the bank and back to their units. The soldiers were still dazed and breathless from the spectacle of the Mexican girls and were slow to comply, but they did as they were ordered.

All evening the talk around the campfires was of the wonderful exhibition the girls had put on and of the grand time the three who swam across must be having. Bets were made whether they would return, the odds favoring that they would, because the penalty for desertion was far more severe than for simply being absent without leave to have a good time with a girl.

They were struck that night by a violent storm that jarred them awake in fearful certainty that the camp was under artillery attack, so explosive were the thunderclaps. Lightning lit the night with a ghostly incandescence. The wind shook the trees and tore at the tents and carried some away. The river rushed and swelled and overran its banks. It ripped
through the brush and made a mire of the lower reaches of the American camp. The storm raged through the night and finally broke just before dawn. The water receded swiftly and the sun rose red as blood over a landscape sodden and fetid with mud and littered with tents and roof straw and river reeds, with uprooted shrubs and drowned dogs and half-plucked chickens caught on driftwood at the river’s edge.

That afternoon one of the three who’d crossed the river to be with the girls came back, rowed across by a pair of Mexican soldiers with a white flag attached to the muzzle of a rifle. They let him out of the boat in the shallows and quickly rowed back to their own side.

The soldier, Thomson by name, was brighteyed with excitement and told the men who gathered round him on the bank—John and Lucas and Handsome Jack among that avid audience—what a wonderful and generous people the Mexicans were, how religious, how beautiful and affectionate the women, how delicious the food and delightful the music. Thomson said the other two were not coming back. The only reason he himself had returned was that he did not want to break his mother’s heart.

Now a guard detail showed up and the lieutenant in charge placed him under arrest and they took him away. None of them ever saw him again.

The next morning another seven soldiers swam the river, and then five more the day after that. Taylor increased the number of guards along the bank and gave specific orders that nobody was to go in the water except to bathe and then no deeper than his knees. The next day fourteen men swam across. Taylor posted a new directive: Any man seen swimming toward the other side would be warned to turn back and if he did not he would be shot. When one of Taylor’s staff officers pointed out that desertion in peacetime was not a capital offense, Taylor responded gruffly: “Disobeying my orders can damn sure be.”

The following day four men pretending to bathe in the shallows suddenly began swimming hard for the other shore and ignored the American guards’ calls to turn about. In full view of the camp and the Mexicans watching from the other bank the guards opened fire and two of the swimmers spasmed and flailed and bright red billows spread around them in the brown water and they sank from sight. The other two made it across and were hastily hustled away by the Mexican guards.

A week after the exhibition at the river, the sergeant of the guard led John and Riley to the smitty’s tent next to the main corral where each was relieved of his ball and chain. As they came out of the tent Riley clicked his heels and John laughed.

That evening dozens of copies of a Mexican handbill were somehow smuggled past the sentries and were soon circulating throughout the camp. They bore the signature of Pedro Ampudia, commanding general of the Mexican Army of the North:

“What you make of it, John?” Lucas asked, reading the broadside over one of Riley’s shoulders while John read it over the other.

“The man wants the Brits to quit this army and join his,” John said.

“I know
that
” Lucas said. “Do ye reckon he means Americans too?”

“It dont say he’d turn a Yankee down,” Riley said. “He’s awful shy, though, aint he, about saying just how much he’ll pay a man to go over?” They all three looked at one another but none said anymore about it.

All over the camp soldiers were ridiculing the handbill, pretending to wipe themselves with it and putting matches to it and pointing at each other and calling, “Catlick slave! Catlick slave!” But some among the Irish were not laughing, nor some of the Germans. They looked at each
other and glanced repeatedly across the river. And each look they gave to the other side was longer than the one before.

That night John dreamt he was running hard through a wide marsh and every time he looked back he saw Daddyjack coming behind him at a walk, following a tracking hound on a leash and steadily gaining ground on John. And then it was no longer a hound on the end of the leash but Maggie, fully naked and moving on all fours as smoothly as a hunting dog, her face close to the ground and hard on his scent, leading Daddyjack on a zigzag course but always toward John, always closing the distance though John was running hard and gasping and felt his heart would burst in his chest. Daddyjack was closing the distance and now yelled, “Blood always finds blood! Always!” And now Maggie was upright and laughing, her pretty breasts jiggling as she trotted ahead of Daddyjack on the leash….

And then he was awake, sitting up and gasping and pouring sweat, and Lucas Malone and Jack Riley were sitting up too and staring at him in the moonlit tent and he guessed he must have cried out. But neither said anything to him. After a moment he lay back down and heard them sigh hard and resettle themselves too. And each man of them lay awake late into the night with the rough company of his own thoughts.