In the Rogue Blood (40 page)

On the following day he went to Mixcoac and saw hanged the other four Saint Patricks convicted at San Angel. He’d not intended to witness any more of the executions after the Tacubaya hangings but that night Daddyjack had come to him in a shadowy dream, eye aglitter and bloody hair wild, whispering, “It aint done, it aint done.” He’d asked what he was talking about but Daddyjack only shook his head and hissed again, “It aint done, I tell ye!” He seemed nigh to lunacy.

The dream upset Edward, filled him with forboding that John might yet be hanged, and so he went to Mixcoac to see for himself that he was not. He kept his own company all the rest of that day and all of the next, his thoughts consumed by his brother.

That evening the Spy Company returned from its Veracruz mission and Dominguez and Spooner showed up at the hospital and secured Edward’s release. The three repaired to a cantina and there drank beer and tequila and ate chicken mole. Dominguez and Spooner grinningly accused Edward of malingering.

“A damn limp aint no excuse for staying off a
horse
, goddamnit,” Spooner said. “There
we
been, riding all over the damn mountains and all through lowland brush and risking our lives to rid Mexico of bandidos, and here
you
been, laying about and acting like it’s a chore to walk and eating three meals a day and getting fat.”

Dominguez laughed. “If we get rid of all the bandidos in Mexico there would not be one hundred people left in this country.”

“Well for damn sure I’ll be with them other ninety-nine,” Spooner said, “but I caint say about you boys.”

Dominguez and Spooner wanted to witness the execution of the thirty Saint Patricks convicted by the court at Tacubaya. Edward agreed to go with them. He did not tell them of his brother, but his apprehension that John was still in peril of the noose would not dismiss until he had seen the last of the executions carried out.

They arrived as the sun broke over the mountains in a shattering vermilion blaze. The gallows was of the same design as at San Angel but twice as long in order to accommodate the thirty condemned at once. It stood
on a hill just outside of Mixcoac with a clear view to Mexico City and the castle of Chapultepec on a higher hill just west of the capital. The branding brazier was set close by and a smitty already at work on the bellows. The artillery assault on the castle had begun before daybreak and the booming strikes and smoke of the shells were easily visible from the Mixcoac hilltop. So too were the ranks of dragoon and infantry troops down in the valley awaiting the order to attack.

In charge of the executions was Colonel William Selby Harney whose decision to hang all thirty at a stroke was in keeping with his reputation, which as his obituary in 1890 would record was that of a “right hard hater always; somewhat ferocious, too, in the award of punishments.” He was said to have beaten a recalcitrant female slave to death in Saint Louis some dozen years before. During the Indian Wars in Florida he was given to decapitating prisoners and posting their heads on stakes along the riverbanks as warning to the savages. There were tales throughout the army of his prodigious appetite for Indian girls whom he afterwards prevented from bringing charges against him by hanging them for spies. He would now hang the last thirty turncoats in his own fashion.

The three compañeros sat their nervous stamping horses alongside a troop of dragoons posted hard by the gallows and watched a column of ten mule-driven carts come clattering up the hill with three men seated in each cart but for the last, which held only two. The men were bound both hand and foot and when Edward saw that John was not among them his relief was so utter he suddenly felt exhausted. Harney demanded to know of the lieutenant in charge of the prisoner detail why only twenty-nine men had been brought out. The lieutenant explained that one of the condemned, a man named Francis O’Connor, had lost both legs in the Churubusco fight and the doctors had said he was not expected to live more than another day or two.

“Day or two, hell!” Harney thundered. “The bastard will not outlive the morning! Get that sorry son of a bitch out here right now! If any goddamned doctor interferes, tell him I’ll hang
him
too!” The lieutenant rode off at a gallop.

The carts were aligned under the gallows and the prisoners made to stand and the nooses put around their necks. They would wear no hoods. Harney wanted them to witness what was happening at Chapultepec. “You sons of bitches see that Mex flag on the tower?” he said, pointing toward the castle where the infantry assault had begun and riflefire crackled and smoked and the army band marching behind the troops had
Struck up “Yankee Doodle” with all its might. “When that piece of shit comes down and the Stars and Stripes go up,
that’s
when you’ll hang, the whole bastard lot of you. Now you just think about that in the time left to you.”

Dominguez glanced at Spooner and Edward. “Pero que modo de matar es este?” he said in a low voice. “A man does not kill like this. Is no a children’s game.”

“If we got to wait till your flag flies over that tower,” a goateed Saint Patrick called out, “we’ll by God live to eat the goose that fattens on the grass over
yer
fucking grave, ye damned blowhard bastard!”

The other Patricks laughed and the three companeros exchanged grins. Harney hupped his horse over to the cart holding the Patrick who spoke and slashed at him with his saber, gashing open the man’s face.

“Damn ye!” the Patricio shouted. “Damn ye for the cowardly rascal ye are!” Blood poured off his rent face and his teeth were visible through the open flap in his cheek.

“He’s ruined yer looks for sure, Larry!” a Patrick in a neighboring cart yelled out. “Ye’ll not turn the head of a pretty girl the rest of your born days, I’ll wager!” The bleeding man called Larry laughed along with his comrades.

Harney was redfaced with fury but knew he could not make them cease their mockery nor their mirth, not short of shooting them, which would but deprive him of the pleasure of seeing them hang.

“Laugh, you whoreson bastards!” he said. “We’ll see how you laugh when Old Glory rides up that pole and you’re dancing on the air. We’ll see who’ll be laughing then!”

They carried on in jocular fashion, these condemned men, as the American infantry advanced steadily up the Chapultepec hill through the fierce defending fire and made the castle walls.

The legless Saint Patrick, O’Connor, now arrived in a hospital wagon and was transferred to a hanging cart where a board was laid across the slat sides to set him upon with his hands bound behind him. A noose was snugged round his neck and the rope made taut to keep him from toppling. The bandages around the man’s leg stumps were red-brown with blood and stained yellow with pus and gave feast to a growling riot of flies. His eyes were black hollows and he looked nearly dead where he sat.

Now the infantry had breached the walls of the castle and a pale haze of smoke and dust rose from within where the fighting was hand to hand
and the bayonet would decide the day. For nearly another half-hour the battle raged at Chapultepec. When some of the Patricks mockingly complained that they were awful damned tired of standing, others of them joked that they’d be a far sight more discomforted if they tried to sit down. And then the last of the gunfire fell off and a minute later a faint but prolonged cheering from the castle came to the men on the hill. Harney came alert and stood in the stirrups as if he might thus be able to see over the distant walls.

And now the Mexican flag began to descend and Harney reined his mount around and trotted his horse along the front of the gallows and grinned up at the array of condemned men fallen silent who only a moment before had been joking about their tired legs.

“Ready your whips!” Harney ordered the muleteers at the wagon reins.

“Look there now!” he shouted at the condemned and pointed toward the castle tower where the Mexican flag was now gone from sight. “Look there at the last sight your traitorous eyes will ever see. Look there at the flag you betrayed, damn your souls!”

Over the tower of Chapultepec castle now rose the Stars and Stripes, shining in the sun. And every noosed man stared at it and beyond to his own eternity.

“Laugh
now!’
Harney bellowed. And cackled like a lunatic. And slashed the air overhead with his saber to send the wagons clattering forward and in the next moment the renegades were kicking wildly at the emptiness under their feet like crazed marionettes—all but one who lacked the legs to kick with—and then the thirty were dangling dead in the haze of that ancient Mexican hill.

There followed the floggings and brandings of the eight whose death sentences had been commuted and who would be made to bury their hanged comrades. And as those punishments were taking place Edward told Dominguez he wanted his help and Dominguez asked for what and Edward told him, “To help my brother escape from prison.”

In the
North American
, yet another American newspaper publishing in Mexico City at this time, appeared the following editorial:

And on the eve following the executions at Mixcoac, an editorial in the
Diario del Gobeirno
, a Mexico City newspaper, proclaimed thus:

Such was the opposition of American and Mexican sentiments on the subject of the San Patricios. Americans everywhere castigated them as damnable traitors while Mexicans of all stations venerated them as heroes. Scott refused the Mexican entreaties to free the Saint Patricks from prison. But he did permit the city council to send a team of inspectors to see for themselves that the Saint Patricks were being humanely treated. They were locked up in the Acordada penitentiary, an imposing whitewashed colonial building that covered almost a whole city block on the wide and lovely Calle Patoni. Armed guards manned the walls of the large central courtyard where the prisoners passed their days playing cards, exercising, writing letters, napping in the shade of the ahuehuete
trees around the fountain. In the early evening they were locked into a common cell that took up half of the second floor. Tall barred windows afforded them a clear view of the busy sidewalk and street below and of the lovely Alameda with its smooth stone walkways and dense green trees and flower gardens bursting with colors. The inspectors saw that each man had been given a shirt and pair of trousers, shoes, and a sleeping mat and blanket, and they verified that the men were adequately fed. The council requested that the prisoners be permitted to receive social visitors and gifts, and against the protests of his advisers Scott consented. Newspapers began to report on the daily parade of people, mostly priests and women, let into the prison to visit with the San Patricios and bestow upon them rich foods and pastries and clean clothes and books. Every man of them had been presented with a bunk with a soft mattress and received a daily change of freshly laundered linens. One of their benefactors had furnished the cell with a long table and benches where the men might sit to write letters and consult with their attorneys. All this generosity to the traitors made the editor of the
North American
wax choleric:

One such woman was the Señora Olga Maritza Martinez de del Castro, a wealthy widow of middle age and regal aspect whose father was a retired ambassador and whose husband, a colonel of lancers with Ampudia’s army, had died a hero’s death at Monterrey. Señora del Castro would evermore dress in mourning and vehemently despise all things American but for the men of the San Patricio Battalion, whom she regarded as saints for their devoted defense of her beloved country. She had contributed lavishly to the Mexican war effort, and as one of the capital’s leading social luminaries she was often quoted in the Mexican press regarding her views on American barbarities and San Patricio heroism. She made regular visits to the Patricios and was afforded every deference by the prisonkeepers on directive of General Scott who’d been informed of her social standing. She had shaken the hand of each Saint
Patrick in the Acordada and ensured that they were fed on ample cuts of meat every day. It was she who arranged for them to have mattressed bunks to sleep upon. And because she was a woman of liberal sensibilities who well and frankly understood the needs of men, she sent an emissary to General Scott with a special petition. Scott had already quietly granted to the half-dozen married Saint Patricks the same right of weekly conjugal visitation that Mexican law conferred on its own convicts, and now Señora del Castro asked that he extend to the unmarried Patricios an equal right of intimate relations with their sweetheart or, lacking one, with a woman of the trade. She herself would arrange for the women and bear all costs associated with their visits. On learning that such amatory privileges were routinely sanctioned by Mexican penal authorities, Scott shrugged and acquiesced to the señora’s request. The Mexican newspapers applauded her efforts on behalf of more civilized treatment for the San Patricios but the American papers excoriated Scott for extending his excessive benevolence to the traitors to such lengths as this immoral Mexican practice.

Came a morning when a trio of men—two Americans and a Mexican and all three in well-tailored business suits—presented themselves at her door and informed the mayordomo that they desired an audience with Señora del Castro. They claimed to be friends of the San Patricios and in possession of information about them which the señora might find of great interest. The mayordomo asked them to wait and while he was within they wondered if he might be sending for the authorities to arrest them for trespassers or worse. Then he was back and politely ushered them into the parlor where the señora awaited them. Her appraising look at the two Americans was openly suspicious, yet she bade all three sit and had a servant pour tea. The Mexican spoke for the visitors, applying his most formal Spanish although it was well known the señora owned a flawless English. He introduced himself as Captain Jorge Amado and his two friends as Lieutenant James Walker and Corporal William Meese, all three of the San Patricio Battalion, lucky survivors who had eluded capture at Churubusco and were now under Santa Ana’s direct order to reorganize the unit as quickly as possible for return to action against the Yankees.

The señora was thrilled by this revelation and there followed much expression of mutual admiration, on her part for their valorous struggle in the defense of Mexico, on theirs for her generosity toward their imprisoned comrades and fierce public support of their organization. The
two Americans apologized for their wretched Spanish but the señora dismissed the notion with a wave of her hand and said in English, “In the language of bravery you are both supremely fluent.”

The visitors shortly came to the point. Their new unit was almost fully manned and was eager to resume operations against the Yankee supply lines between the capital and Veracruz but it lacked an explosives expert, and the best explosives man they knew of was now among the prisoners in Acordada. Although there was absolutely no chance to free all their imprisoned fellows, it might yet be possible to help
one
to escape. And that was why they had come to her. If she were willing, she could be of great service to her country.

But of course she was willing! Just tell her what to do!

Barely an hour later the mayordomo brought before them a half-dozen men closely fitting the description given by the youngest of the three Patricios, he with the gouged face who limped on a cane and wore a black bandanna over his crown. The six men were lined up in front of this young man who carefully studied each of them in turn before pointing out his selection. The señora smiled and nodded. Like everyone else on her staff, the chosen man, Luis by name, was completely devoted to her and would do whatever she asked.