In the Rogue Blood (38 page)

The Spy Company did not engage in the initial assault. General Twiggs, directing the attack on the convent via the Coyoacán Road, held them in reserve in a willow copse a half-mile south of San Angel. They sat on the ground smoking and talking, their saddled horses close by, their rifles at hand. The day had dawned cool after a night of pouring rain but had warmed quickly as the sun rose, and now in the late forenoon the air was hot and thick. They could hear the battle raging, the steady blasting of Mexican artillery and the continuous clatter of small arms, the war cries and the screams of men, the shrieking of downed horses.

They’d heard rumor that Twiggs did not trust the Spy Company to fight its best against their own countrymen, and now old Lázaro said it looked like it was true. “I hope to hell it be true,” Spooner said in English and grinned at Edward.

But Dominguez was insulted. “This Tweegs, he don’t think I fight hard against Mexicanos?” he said. “Bermejillo, he is not Mexicano? Torrejón? Miñón? My good amigo, Lucero, I kill
him. He
is not Mexicano?”

“Hey Manuel,” Spooner said, “just listen to what’s going on out yonder. You
hear
that shit? You want to get into
thai
? I sure’s hell don’t. Twiggs can leave us out of it till hell freezes over, be fine by me.”

But two hours into the battle Twiggs sent orders for them to mount up immediately and join the attack. They stepped up onto their saddles and rode hard up the Coyoacán Road toward the hellish din and crested a small rise just as an artillery shell struck the causeway not forty feet in front of them and the first six riders in the column, including Dominguez, went down with their shrieking horses.

Edward’s mount was struck by shrapnel and it trumpeted and veered wildly off the causeway and into the adjoining cornfield and its legs buckled and Edward was unseated. He scrambled to his feet, his hands thick with mud but still grasping his rifle. The horse was gone. He knocked the rifle barrel against his bootsole to clear the muzzle of mud. The cornstalks were almost as tall as he was and the field was hazed with gunsmoke. The earth shook with cannon rounds. The convent looked ghostly in the distance ahead. He scrabbled up the causeway embankment and peered over it and saw the battered San Antonio Road a furlong or so to the east. Saw the small vague shapes of bodies sprawled over the road and bobbing in the shallow marshwater. General Worth’s infantry was slogging through the marsh toward the bridgehead as artillery shells continued
to blast in their midst. He looked to the convent and saw a cannon flare orange on the wall and he rolled down the embankment as the roundshot whined overhead and struck the ground with a shudder a bare fifteen yards behind him.

Now a shell exploded on the other side of the causeway and flung up body parts in a shower of blood and black water. Dominguez came tumbling down the embankment and sprawled beside Edward and sat up wildeyed and muddy. He was bareheaded and blood ran out of his hair and over his face and mustache. He wiped his chin with his fingers and stared at the blood on them and looked at Edward in outrage. “Esos chingados casi me mataron!” He glared all about as if those who would kill him might be fast closing in on him, then snatched up his hat and put it on and looked at Edward fiercely. “Pues, vamos a ver quien mata quien! Andale, Eduardito, sigúeme!”

He followed Dominguez into the cornstalks and toward the convent looming a hundred yards away. Just ahead of them a regiment of Twigg’s infantry was pushing forward through the cornfield too. The causeway was littered with dead and dying men and horses and continued to receive heavy artillery fire. Edward was sure that if he stopped moving he would be killed on the instant. He sensed that the only tactic of the moment was the same as in any fight—keep going toward whoever was trying to kill you and get to him and kill him first. Other compañeros converged about them as they advanced. The greater portion of the company was yet alive. Spooner materialized from the smoke like some malevolent spectre bent on annihilation. His sleeve gleamed bright with blood. “Kill em!” he demanded of Edward as if the idea had only just come to him. “Kill em all!” They went forward at a crouch through the corn, moving past corpses, past wounded men begging for help, for water, cursing, praying aloud for an end to their agony. The compañeros pressed on. The ground quivered under them with every blast of artillery. Rifle balls hummed over their heads. The screaming of the world was incessant.

As Twiggs’ forces closed in on the convent the cannons on the walls and steeple began firing canister and grape and dozens of Yankees fell shrieking at each blast. The compañeros dropped to the ground and grasped tightly to the muddy earth. Edward heard himself cursing at he knew not what. Grapeshot ripped through the stalks. He smelled blood through the muck in his nose. Then came a blast of different timbre—an explosion not against earth but against stone, and there followed a chorus of cheers from the Americans in the corn ahead. He got to his feet and
peered over the stalks as another blast resounded from the convent and he saw a great spray of broken stone rising high on the far side of the church and come raining down again.

“It’s Worth’s boys!” Spooner shouted. “They musta took the bridge! They using the Mexes’ own guns on that damn church is what they doing!”

A round struck the steeple above its walkway and gouged out a great chunk of it and set the church bells tolling madly. The infantrymen in the corn let another lusty cheer. A shell blasted on a monastery roof and flung up a scattering of riflemen like rag dolls. Now a section of the wall before them blew apart—an explosion of such force it could only have been a powder store struck by a shell or set off by a spark. At the sight of the sudden breach directly ahead, the lead wave of infantry rose up in the cornfield with a huge and quavering war cry and led by their captains with sabers raised high surged toward the convent.

“Adelante!” Dominguez yelled. “
Adelantef
” He was on his feet and brandishing a bayoneted Hall and running for the broken wall and the compañeros rose and charged behind him.

Edward’s field of vision now narrowed to that small segment of the world immediately before him. He was but dimly aware of the riflefire storming down on them, of the men before him and alongside him whose hands flew up as they fell and over whom he leaped or on whom he stepped as he kept running for the wall and the gaping rift in it where the first Americans were now plunging through to the interior. He glanced up at the top of the wall as it loomed closer and saw there the dark white-eyed faces of Mexican riflemen and saw a gun crew clustered about a cannon but now they too were shooting with rifles and he knew they had run out of artillery rounds. As he arrived at the breach he looked up again and saw that the gun crew was of white men.

And then he was in the courtyard and shooting a little Mexican soldier who came rushing at him with poised bayonet and looked about fourteen years old and the boy fell at his feet with blood gushing from his mouth and his eyes rolled up. Mexicans were everywhere shooting and stabbing at the first rush of Yankees and at their sides their women with bared teeth flailed with knives and now the courtyard was aflood with American troops pouring through the broken walls and scaling over the others and dropping down into the rose bushes with high tremulous howls.

He was knocked down from behind and rolled quickly against the base of the fountain and saw high on the steeple walkway a pair of Mexican
riflemen with white flags tied to their rifle barrels. But the men were grabbed from behind and the white flags ripped away and one of them who would surrender was shot in the head by a big hatless redhaired man and the other was lifted bodily by a graybearded man and pitched into space and he came wheeling down screaming but barely audible over the din and struck the rim of the stone fountain and his head burst open and he flopped to the cobblestones as if his bones were turned to sand.

Cisco fell beside Edward with a face masked in blood, slashing up with his saber at a pair of Mexican soldiers trying to bayonet him. Edward jumped to his feet and thrust his bayonet through one soldier’s throat and as the other turned to him Cisco skewered him through the thigh and the Mexican screamed and fell with blood jetting from the wound.

The courtyard was a pandemonium of outcries, screams, curses, the crack and pop and ricochet whines of gunfire, the ringing clash of bayonets and sabers. The air was thick with dust and smoke and the smells of shit and blood. Edward wielded his rifle with both hands like a club and felt every strike break bone. He stumbled on a body and went down again and saw the hazy sky for a moment before it was blocked from view by a crush of bodies slashing over him with rifles and bayonets and someone in a Spy Company uniform rent the belly of a Mexican soldier with a bowie and the Mexican’s guts poured down beside Edward like a tangle of bloody blue snakes. The bowie-wielder was Fredo Ruiz who yanked him to his feet and pulled him away toward the stone steps of the church where a dozen compañeros were already rushing inside. The cobbles were slippery with blood, the whitewashed walls spattered and smeared with it.

Edward had a Colt in his hand and took the steps two at a time. But now Fredo fell and Edward nearly tripped over him and he bent to help him to his feet and saw that he had a large red hole just behind his ear and was dead. He holstered his pistol and took Fredo’s two Colts and raced up the steps and into the dimness of the church where the compañeros were shooting and clubbing and stabbing at a horde of Mexicans slashing with bayonets. Edward fired the Colts till both were empty and he put down five Mexicans. He threw aside Fredo’s empty pistols and drew his own but the compañeros now had the rest of the Mexicans backed against a wall and in quick order shot or bayoneted them every one.

“Por acá!” Dominguez was at an inner door, pistol in hand, gesturing for them to go up the stairway just beyond. “Arriba! Arriba en el campanario
hay una bola de artilleristas.
Mátenlos
, muchachos, mátenlos todos!” He let Chucho and a dozen others lead the scramble up the winding stairway to the door leading out to the steeple walkway and fell in beside Edward and showed him a crazyman’s grin. Clambering up the stairs behind them came a surge of Yankee riflemen with a bellowing captain in the lead.

“Está abierta!” Chucho shouted, surprised to find the door unbolted. He kicked it open wide to admit a blaze of daylight—and a deafening blast of canister tore him and five others to pieces and sprayed their bloody bits over the men below them on the stairs.

The canister was their last artillery round. Jack had charged the gun and turned it toward the door and ordered the bolt shot back and said, “We’ll give them a warm welcome, by Jesus!” They had not a rifle bullet left among them, only a few loaded caplock pistols, only their ready knives and bayonets now as the Yankees came howling through the smoke and the destroyed doorway. But the first of them weren’t Yankees at all—they were Mexicans in flat black hats and strange uniforms that bore the U.S. insignia and one of the Mexican defenders blurted, ‘Oye, pero qué—?” and the Black Hats fired from the hip and dropped a dozen dumbfounded San Patricios where they stood before they all came together in a clash of bayonets and rifle butts and slashing sabers and knives and curses and shrieks. Men fell in sprays of blood from gashed throats and ripped bellies and punctured femorals. Those San Patricios armed with pistols shot whom they could with their single round and then flailed wildly with the empty guns. John was thrusting with his bayonet and clubbing with the rifle butt and falling back along the blood-slicked walkway as the Black Hats and now regular Yankee soldiers too pressed in on him and the dwindling Patricios around him. He impaled a grayhaired Black Hat through the stomach but the bayonet would not come free so he let go the rifle and drew his charged pistol with one hand and his knife with the other and now saw Lucas Malone wrestling with a Black Hat over a bayoneted rifle and he slashed the Black Hat’s neck to the bone. Lucas grinned at him and then a numbing blow on the side of his face sat John down hard. A Yankee loomed over him and made to slash at him with a saber but John was the quicker and stabbed him between
the legs and the soldier screamed and dropped his sword and fell away. And there was Edward in his black hat not six feet distant and staring at him open-mouthed and in that moment a San Patricio ran a bayonet into Edward’s side. John shot the Patricio in the head a bare second before he himself was knocked back and his head struck stone and then the wavering image of a grinning Yankee soldier clarified into that of Master Sergeant Kaufmann who stood astraddle him and raised a bayoneted rifle to run him through—but a forearm appeared around Kaufmann’s face and a knife moved across his throat and blood leapt from the open wound and Kaufmann died as he fell. Edward stood with knife in hand and blood slogging down his side and he was gaping at his brother—and then abruptly doubled over and grabbed his knee and then spasmed and fell forward and John scrambled atop him and embraced him tightly and tensed himself for a bullet or blade in the back but now someone was hollering, “Cease action!
Cease action
, goddamnit, it’s done!”

He awoke on a stretcher laid on the courtyard stones. The sun glared just above the west wall and the air smelled of smoke and carnage and was snarling with flies. There was moaning and weeping all around, cursing loud and low in both English and Spanish, pleas for water, for medical attention, for a bullet to end the pain. To one side of him lay a man with no face who yet breathed. On his other side lay a blond and dead-eyed American soldier whose viscera were visible through a large raw hole in his flank.

His knee throbbed and his side was on fire and every heartbeat pounded his skull with pain. The sky looked atilt. Now he heard a voice shrieking curses in Spanish, vilifying someone as turds, as filthy snakes, the vomit of pigs, the bottoms of shit pits, as even worse traitors to Mexico than La Malinche, the whore of Cortés.

He struggled up onto his elbows to see over the dead man beside him and caught sight of a column of Mexican prisoners being led across the courtyard with a general at its fore and it was he who was cursing so stridently. He had an arm bound up against his chest and a bloodstained bandage over one eye and the objects of his vilification were the onlooking members of the Spy Company. Dominguez stood by with his coatee open and his thumbs hooked in his belt and he stared back at the passing
general without expression or remark. Spooner stood beside him and stared back too, grinning largely, one arm in a sling and a bandage around his thigh. The other compañeros were all looking off in various directions and none of them meeting the eyes of the general who so vehemently denunciated them. The general swept them with an accusing finger as he limped past and swore that Mexico would exact its vengeance on them for the miserable turncoat whoresons that they were. The women accompanying the prisoners spat at the men of the Spy Company, and the compañeros backed out of range until the women had gone by.

Then came the captured Americans in Mexican uniforms and now the great crowd of U.S. soldiers began excoriating them and spitting at them and pelting them with rocks and mud and dogshit and calling for their blood, calling for them to be shot on the spot, to be hanged from the cypress trees. Their most sulfurous fulminations were directed at a tall redhead whom Edward recognized as the man who had shot the Mexican in the steeple for trying to wave a white flag. “We’ll all of us piss on yer grave, Riley, ye miserable bastard!” one hollered at him. The one called Riley looked at the man and clapped a hand on his bicep and raised his fist. The Americans howled with rage and began surging forward and they would surely have torn Riley and his fellows to pieces had not Generals Twiggs and Worth, sitting their horses in the forefront of the crowd, ordered them to stand fast.

“You’re the lowest scum on the earth!” A wildfaced Irishman shouted at the passing prisoners. “The filthiest bastards to ever shame the face of God is what you are!”

“You’ll see these sons of bitches hang, boys!” Twiggs bellowed. “Every last traitorous dog of them!”

Edward strained to hold his head up, scanning the column of American prisoners and finally spying John as he trudged past in his bloodstained tunic, hatless and indifferent to the maledictions raining on him and his fellows. Hardly flinching as a rock glanced off his shoulder. Staring dead ahead as if fixed upon an impatient fate.

Edward fell back and the sky above whirled and he spun into darkness.