In the Rogue Blood (39 page)

When next he woke he was in the U.S. Army hospital at Tacubaya, within two miles of the heart of the capital. He had been unconscious
for nearly three days. He’d lost much blood through the bayonet wound in his side and his kidney had been damaged and the doctors had thought he might die. Then his fever began to ease and the worst was past. But his knee had been shattered by a pistol ball and they debated whether to amputate and finally decided the leg could stay. But the knee would never again bend more than slightly and so he would limp for the rest of his life. “At least,” a doctor told him, “you’ll be limping on your own leg and not on a wooden stump.” He’d suffered a concussion as well, and the ringing in his ears would likely prove permanent. When one doctor asked what had happened to his scalp, Edward looked at him without expression and the doctor asked no more about it.

Over the following week he mostly slept, waking occasionally to gulp water as if trying to douse a fire in his belly, to slurp soup spooned to him by the nurses. But even the effort of trying to think clearly was exhausting, and so he slept. Slept and dreamt of Daddyjack with his single eye and in his bloody-crotched trousers wandering through the charred and smoky remains of a large razed house and muttering angrily to himself as he kicked at the smoldering cinders. He spotted Edward where he lay wounded and in a sweat on a blanket under a drooping willow. “Ye done good,” he said. “The both ye. Bloodkin’s all ye got in the world and ye got to protect ye brother and him to protect you. It’s how it be with brothers and no matter their blood’s been tainted.” He scratched his whiskered face and looked at Edward slyly. “Aye—tainted I say! Poisoned! Poisoned sure as if she put rattler venom in ye veins while ye were yet curled in her belly, you and ye brother and ye sister too. She poisoned my tree, that demon whore! Poisoned it and made it to bear a bad bitter fruit.” He went back to sifting through the ashes of the house and Edward wanted to speak to him but it was as if he’d been robbed of all language shaped of words.

When he finally sat up in bed and began eating with appetite and again taking notice of the world around him eleven days had passed since the battle of Churubusco. He was informed that Colonel Dominguez and others of the Spy Company had come by to see after him several times but he’d each time been asleep when they came and the doctor would
not have them wake him. Two days ago the company had left as an escort to a military train bound for Veracruz.

From the nurses and fellow patients Edward learned that General Scott had halted his army just at the outskirts of Mexico City and struck an armistice with Santa Ana in order to discuss peace terms. On their pledge not to take up arms again for the rest of the war, Scott had released most of the three thousand Mexican prisoners captured in the push to the capital’s perimeter, and there’d been a good deal of muttering in the American ranks about that. “Lots of fellas think he ought to of shot them all,” said a man in the bed beside his, an artillery corporal named Walter Berry who’d lost a foot. “A dead man’s a lot less like to fight you again than a fella who promises he won’t.”

“Leastways Old Scotty didn’t turn loose a one of them deserter sonsabitches call themselfs Saint Paddies,” said a man named Alan Overmeyer who lay in the bed on Edward’s other flank. Overmeyer had lost his right arm and right leg and so he looked like he’d been halved by length.

“Hell no, he didn’t!” Walter Berry said. “Scotty’d let
them
go, his own army would of hung
him
, you bet!”

“That goddamn Santa Aner saying if he’d a had him a hundred more like them Saint Paddies he’d of won the fight. Shit! All the more reason to hang all the sons of bitches, I say. Saint Paddies, my sorry ass—Saint Judases more like it.”

They told Edward that more than half of the Saint Patrick Battalion had been killed at Churubusco. Nearly two dozen were unaccounted for and a few of them were presumed to have escaped. Some ninety had been captured and seventy-two of them charged with desertion from the United States Army. Scott wasted no time bringing them to trial. Forty-three had been tried at Tacubaya the Monday before last and three days later the other twenty-nine were tried at San Angel. Every man of them but two were found guilty and sentenced to hang.

“Ye should of heard the cheer in that San Angel court when the judges passed sentence on Riley,” a nurse named Marlin Grady said. “I was right there and I mean to tell ye I thought the roof would blow off the place, so loud it was. Oh, that’s one right hated bastard, Riley. It’s him formed that bunch of rebel Paddies and him that had the blasphemous balls to call them by good Saint Patrick’s name. He’s done naught but blacken us Irishmen each one, he has, the filthy son of a bitch.”

“They hung them all?” Edward asked, feeling his own throat constricting
tightly. He saw John’s face before him now as clearly as he had up on the steeple walkway in the instant they’d caught sight of each other, his astonished bloodsmeared face.

“Not yet they aint, but it’s good as done, by Jesus,” said Walter Berry. “It’s only for Old Fuss and Feathers to approve the sentences all officiallike and then it’s the noose for them Judas bastards.”

The trials had been covered by
The American Star
, a Yankee newspaper that had begun publication in Jalapa and followed after the U.S. Army since, and Marlin Grady brought Edward some back issues so he could read the accounts for himself. He thereby learned that one of the Saint Patricks, a fellow named Ellis, was ruled never to have been properly enlisted and so was acquitted on that technicality—and two hours later was attacked in the street by a bunch of U.S. soldiers and beaten nearly to death before a crowd of Mexicans rescued him and spirited him away. Another Saint Patrick, Lewis Prefier, had not been in a Mexican uniform when captured, had in fact been completely naked, and he besides proved to be crazy, so loony he didn’t even know his own name and could not be made to understand the simplest questions put to him any more than could a dog, and so the court granted him a discharge paper and he was shortly thereafter driven from the gates of the garrison under a hail of flung stones.

Only six of the accused pled guilty. Most of the others all professed their innocence of deliberate desertion and claimed to have been coerced by one means or another into joining the Mexican side. A few held their tongues throughout. But the prosecution brought forth two Saint Patrick prisoners as witnesses, an Englishman and an Irishman who had been residents of Mexico since before the war and had never been in the American army. They were willing to testify against their fellow Patricks in exchange for early release from prison. They pointed at each of the accused in turn and said that they had seen him willingly put on the uniform of the Mexican army and bear arms against the Americans.

Included in the reports was an alphabetical list of the seventy men condemned to hang. And there—between “Klager, John” and “Logen-hamer, Henry”—Edward read the name of his only true brother in this world. And wanted to howl.

The newspaper also carried several sardonic accounts of the Mexican outcry against the death sentences passed on their beloved San Patricios. Civil and military officials of every rank protested publicly. The Archbishop of Mexico himself made a plea to Winfield Scott on their behalf,
as did the British foreign minister. The Irish leader of the deserters, John Riley, whom the Americans held as the most detestable of the loathsome lot, attracted the most ardent defenders. A petition for clemency toward him was submitted to Scott and signed by nearly two dozen “Citizens of the United States and Foreigners of different Nations in the City of Mexico.” It read, in part:

In response to the clamor for leniency toward the Saint Patricks, General David Twiggs told
The American Star
that it was Generals Santa Ana and Ampudia and Arista who had solicited and “seduced from duty” the men who deserted the American ranks, and so it was they who were responsible for the price the “poor wretches” would now pay for their crimes.

Over the next week Edward fast regained strength. The wound in his side knit tightly and he got out of bed and for longer periods every day and walked up and down the ward, the first two days with the aid of a crutch before he switched to a cane. Yet he felt like a man in a dream. The world about him was starkly clear but seemed to move slowly, as if underwater. He felt an unyielding dread. Each time he closed his eyes he saw his brother’s face. He had no thoughts at all.

Now came Scott’s rulings on the verdicts of the courts. For various reasons he granted outright pardons to five of the condemned. In fifteen other cases he found that the men had deserted before the war’s official declaration and therefore could not, according to the Articles of War, be
legally executed. These fifteen would instead receive fifty lashes on the bare back and be hot-iron branded on the cheek with a
D
for “deserter.” They would thereafter remain imprisoned until the U.S. Army removed itself from Mexico, at which time they would have their heads shaved to the scalp and the buttons ripped from their uniforms and be drummed out of service to the tune of “The Rogue’s March”:

The sentences of the fifty others he let stand. They would hang.

On learning that John Riley was one of the fifteen to be spared the rope the hospital went into uproar. Chamber pots were pitched through windows and plates of food sent crashing against the walls. Scott was cursed for a stupid bastard. Walter Berry shouted, “Riley’s the
main
whoreson of them! He’s the one most goddamn well
ought
to hang!” Overmeyer wept with fury. The outrage was rampant through the ranks. The
Star
quoted Scott’s aide-de-camp as saying the general had walked the floor each night as he struggled with his decision. He had known the troops would be inflamed by the commutation of Riley’s sentence. His staff officers had argued that it would be preferable to spare all the other turncoats than to reprieve Riley. Scott rebutted them with the point that the law was the law, that the Articles of War prohibited Riley’s execution, and if he did not cleave to the law he would as much violate his own duty as John Riley had violated his. He would sooner be killed in the assault on Mexico City, he reportedly said, than to violate his duty to the law.

Edward wanted only to know who besides Riley had been spared from execution, but he could not of course reveal he had bloodkin amid the traitors. He hobbled through the ward trying to cadge a newspaper but none of the few who had one would part with it while they read and cursed and re-read the hard news about Riley. Marlin Grady finally went out and bought more newspapers and Edward took one and sat on his bed and spread it before him and scanned the names of the fully pardoned five and recognized none. He cursed lowly and then ran his eye down the list of fifteen whose sentences had been commuted and did not see John’s name. He saw Riley’s but not John’s and his breath caught and his throat tightened and he felt like screaming, like shooting somebody.
Then he slowly went down the list again, this time with his finger, and this time touched on “Little, John” and he looked and looked at the name and was afraid to take his eyes from it for fear it would not be there the next time he looked.

On the tenth of September he rose before daybreak and joined some of the other wounded aboard a hospital wagon transport for the three-mile trip to the central plaza in San Angel to attend the punishments of the San Patricios who had there been convicted. Dominguez had not yet returned from Veracruz. The armistice had come to an end three days before and the outskirts of the capital shook steadily with artillery blasts and crackled with small arms. The air again smelled of rotting flesh, smoke, gunpowder and dust.

La Plaza de San Jacinto was packed with spectators a dozen deep in a wide semicircle in front of the church. Every American soldier in San Angel not then engaged in the fighting had turned out to witness the punishments and most of the local citizenry was in attendance as well. The eastern sky was a scarlet riot as the sun broke over the mountains. People watched from rooftops and wagon beds, from their horses and from up in the trees. The town dogs raced about in a yapping frenzy. An army band played “Hail, Columbia” while across the square a Mexican string band strummed out a sequence of extemporaneous ballads in praise of the San Patricios. A gallows had been erected in front of the church, a simple scaffold of four thick beams—an overhead stringer some forty feet long supported by a fourteen-foot beam at either end and another in the center. Sixteen nooses dangled from the stringer and positioned directly below them were eight muledrawn flatbed wagons, each facing in the direction opposite to that of the one beside it and each with a Mexican driver at the reins. At one end of the gallows, resplendent in full-dress uniforms, General Scott and his officers sat their horses. Near to them stood seven black-robed priests. At the other end of the scaffold a squad of soldiers in their undershirts tended a large blacksmith’s brazier shimmering with heat and holding several branding irons and throwing off sparks with each puff of the bellows. A wooden stool was close at hand and a pile of spades. A few yards beyond stood a large oak tree with a coil of rope lying at its base.

Now the drums began to roll and the murmur of the troops rose to an excited babble and then erupted in execrations as a small group of Saint Patricks in their blue Mexican uniforms with their hands manacled in front of them was led into the plaza from around the side of the municipal building. They were seven and John was the second man in the column, directly behind Riley, who was the only one among them being vilified by name. Edward’s heart turned over at the sudden thought that these were the men about to be hanged, that he had misunderstood the newspaper reports, that Scott had changed his mind and decided he’d yet hang them all. But the prisoners were not put aboard the hanging wagons. They were made only to line up facing the gallows.

Then came another column into the plaza and these men had their hands bound behind them and were the men about to die. They were led to the wagons and helped up onto them, two men to a wagon. Their boots were removed and pitched aside and they were made to stand toward the rear of the flatbeds. “How come it’s only sixteen of em?” Edward heard someone ask. “It was twenty spose to hang here.” Someone said he’d heard the other four would be hanged tomorrow at Mixcoac, about a mile and a half away.

“How come’s that?” the first man asked.

“Hell, old son,” the second said, “who knows why the army does anything the way it do?”

Most of the seven prisoners standing witness to the executions were staring down at their own feet, but not John or Riley. Their gaze was fixed on one of the condemned, a graybeard who looked down at them and grinned. “So long, Johnny boys!” he called down through the steady drumbeat. “See you in hell!” A white hood was draped over his head and the same done to the others and then the nooses were set round their necks and snugged up tightly. The drums abruptly fell silent and now the only sounds in the square were the susurrant prayers of the priests and the squawking of crows in the high branches and the sudden barking of a solitary dog. The hoods of the condemned were pulsing against their faces with their quickened breath.

A captain stepped up to the end of the scaffold nearest General Scott and raised a pistol in the air. The muledrivers made ready with their whips. The drums again rolled, louder and faster than before. The captain was watching Scott intently. Scott’s gaze was set on the sixteen hooded men. He looked to Edward like an old man tired with killing. He appeared to sigh. Then his mouth tightened and he nodded and the captain
fired the pistol and the drums cut short and the drovers cracked their whips and four wagons clattered to the east and four to the west and sixteen men dropped off the flatbeds. The crowd gasped and there followed immediately a medley of male laughter and cursing and of women’s wails and sobs. Some of the hanged died on the instant and some kicked wildly for a moment before going limp in the unmistakable attitude of death, but one of them, the graybeard who had called down to John and Riley, was kicking in a way that made it clear his neck was not broken, that his noose had been poorly set and he was slowly choking to death. Soldiers were pointing at him and laughing.

“Pull on him!” John cried out. “Pull on him, goddamnit!” The sergeant of the guard strode quickly down the line to John and punched him full in the mouth, staggering him, shouting, “No talking, prisoner!” Riley looked as if he might kick at him but the sergeant pulled a club from his belt and squared off and Riley held back.

Two of the priests dashed forth and each grabbed one of the graybeard’s legs and tugged down on him and more soldiers joined in the laughter as the graybeard’s pants went dark with piss. John was gaping at the strangling man in anguish with blood running from his mouth. The graybeard yet struggled weakly and there issued from under his hood a horrid croak as the redfaced priests hung their weight on his legs. The man’s neck was now stretched grotesquely and Edward thought his head might tear off. But now a pair of Mexican muledrivers ran over to the priests and took the graybeard’s legs from them and they lifted the man up about two feet and jerked him down hard and snapped his neck and killed him.

The dead were then cut down and the priests bore away seven of them in handcarts, seven who were devout Catholics and had taken Holy Communion and the last rites prior to being ushered to the gallows. They would be buried in a monastery graveyard a mile north of San Angel. The other nine were dragged by the heels around to the side of the church and laid in a line. Already the flies had found them and swarmed over the hooded faces and stained trousers.

The drums began anew and the punishments continued. The seven prisoners spared hanging were now made to form a line before the oak tree and Riley was the first of them ordered to step up to it and strip to the waist. He was stood with his chest against the tree trunk and his arms were bound tightly around it. The muscles stood like cords along his arms and back. General Twiggs was in charge of carrying out the punishments and had appointed a pair of burly Mexican muleteers to take turns delivering
the floggings. He considered the turncoats unworthy of being whipped by Americans. Now one of the skinners stepped out with a rawhide lash in hand and set himself a few feet behind Riley. “Tell them to lay on with all the severity they can muster!” Twiggs called out to his interpreter. “Tell them if they do not, I will have
them
whipped to blood pudding.” The interpreter relayed the order and the muleteers nodded grimly.

The first lash popped like a pistolshot and laid a red stripe across Riley’s back and the onlooking troopers cheered. His muscles bunched and spasmed. Again the whip flashed and Riley’s head threw back and his teeth showed white in his grimace. The muleteer worked with the steady rhythm of a man hewing timber, laying the strokes on hard and with barely a pause between them. The whip cracked and cracked and the stripes cut one over the other and blood stippled the branches and leaves overhead and streaked down Riley’s back to darken his trousers and still he did not cry out, not until the nineteenth stroke, and his first yowl and each he let thereafter on every lash that followed roused louder cheers yet from the American troops. At thirty lashes he was groaning between the cracks of the whip and the soldiers were laughing at him and chiding him for a weakling. The muleskinner was pouring sweat. He grunted with every stroke. By the fortieth lash Riley was sagging against his bonds and the bloodstripes were no longer distinct one from the other but had shaped now a single massive wound and his pants were bloodsoaked to the thighs. Edward thought he might die before the last stroke was laid on. And then it was done. At the count of fifty Riley hung limp on the trunk but was yet conscious. His bonds were loosed and he crumpled to the ground and some of the soldiers cheered this too and derided him for a little sister. The sergeant of the guard prodded him with his boot toe and said something to him too softly for Edward to hear. And Riley, grunting, got to his feet without assistance and turned toward the ranks of troops watching him. He spat at his feet and grinned a crooked wavering grin. Those who had not let off taunting him howled in rage and cursed him and threatened to kill him at the first opportunity. The sergeant of the guard took him aside and sat him down near the brazier. The men tending the fire made mean gibes and the smitty raised a redly glowing branding iron and shook it at him and said he was going to burn him right through to his teeth. Riley muttered for him to fuck his mother. The smitty’s face went livid and he started toward him but the sergeant told
him to get back to the fire and mind his duty. “We aint quits,” the smitty said to Riley.

Now John was shed of his shirt and brought forth to the flogging tree and quickly made fast to it and the other muleteer took up the lash while the first recruited himself with a dipper of water and a cigarette. This time Edward flinched with every crack of the whip. Like Riley, John was limp but still sensible after the fiftieth stroke. “Bedamn if it don’t look like wolves done et on that boy’s back,” said a man near Edward with an arm that ended at the elbow.

“Hell, it aint so bad,” someone else said. “I seen men flogged open to the backbone and all they ribs showed through. I don’t see much bone showing on these boys. They aint hardly getting whipped, you ask me.”

John was made to sit beside Riley and neither man looked at the other as the floggings continued. The blood ran off their backs and soaked their pants and stained the cobblestones beneath them. Whipcracks and outcries and cheers echoed off the plaza walls. Then all seven had received their fifty lashes and the trunk and underbranches of the tree were bespattered with blood. Only two of the Patricks had been unconscious when loosed from the tree and one of them recovered his senses within a few minutes. It was thought the other would die and bets were made among the soldiers but the prostrate Patrick at last bestirred himself after a second dousing with a bucket of water and sat up and his back wore a coat of bloody mud. Those who lost the wager cursed him now more hotly than they had damned him for a traitor.

By the time the last man was set free of the whipping tree the army spectators were chanting, “The iron! The iron! The iron!” in anticipation of the brandings.

Now the prisoners’ hands were manacled behind them and they were again formed into a column with Riley at its head. He was made to sit on the stool hard by the brazier and a burly soldier on either side pinned him fast by an arm and a third man, a huge barrel of a corporal, stood behind him and put an armlock on his head and twisted it tight against his chest so that the right cheek was turned outward. The grinning smitty drew a red iron from the fire and said, “Hold the bastard fast now.”

He put the brand to Riley’s cheek and there was a low sizzle and Riley screamed and the troops cheered and in the next moment Edward caught the sickly-sweet odor of the seared flesh. But now the sergeant of the guard was gesturing angrily at the smitty and calling him a stupid shit and the smitty only shrugged and smiled a wide foolish grin and said,
“Hell, it was a accident is all, I can easy enough make it right.” The other members of the branding detail were grinning too and now Edward saw the reason for their good humor: the
D
brand on Riley’s cheek had been applied backward.

General Twiggs hupped his horse over to the branding party and asked what the hell was going on and the sergeant told him. Twiggs looked down at Riley and chuckled and said, “Well now fella, I guess we
all
make mistakes, don’t we?”

Word of Riley’s botched branding spread among the soldiers and there was laughter and cheering and cries of, “Well done, smitty!” Twiggs smiled at the blacksmith and said, “Do him proper on the other cheek, soldier, and let’s have no more accidents. General Scott wants to be done with this in quick order.”

The big corporal twisted Riley’s head to the other side and exposed his left cheek and the smitty pressed a fresh red iron to it and Riley screamed again.

And then it was John screaming on the stool. They all of them screamed in their turn and soon each bore a dark
D
on his misshapen right cheek.

The prisoners were then handed spades and ordered to dig nine deep graves alongside the church. They swayed and stumbled like drunks at their painful labor to the amusement of the watching soldiers but yet they achieved the task. And when they had done with the digging they lowered into the ground the nine dead men still with the hoods on their faces and covered them up.

They were ordered to put their shirts on and some among them grimaced at the touch of the cloth against their flayed backs, but not John, whom Edward was watching. As they were marched from the plaza one of the prisoners collapsed and the soldiers cheered and chanted “Die! Die! Die!” Riley pulled the man up and draped him over his shoulder and bore him onward. Others of them looked ready to fall but managed to keep their feet. The bloody seven staggered by within ten yards of Edward. As they were passing, John looked over as if drawn by the intensity of Edward’s gaze and their eyes met and Edward wondered if his brother could read in his face the anguish he felt, the fury, the rage to howl and wreak destruction. In John’s maimed face he saw naught but indifference so vast it was frightening. The look of one who cared not at all if the sun should never rise again.