by Drew McGunn
***
Lieutenant Javier Morales tilted his canteen to his lips and gulped down the tepid water. He was bone-tired, having been on the road between Tampico and Reynosa for what seemed like forever. Twelve days was a long time. But apart from the occasional farmer hauling food to market, he had seen hardly any traffic. Before leaving Tampico, he’d been assured the road was safe between the two towns, patrolled regularly by the state government of Tamaulipas. After more than three hundred miles, he was willing to concede the road was safe. Not because the Tamaulipan militia kept it that way, but simply because there was nothing worth taking.
After too many fourteen-hour days in the saddle it wasn’t possible to find a comfortable position, no matter how often he shifted around. He’d long ago decided this road was a pain in the ass. His laughter at his wit would have been louder, save for the hard truth. When he came around a bend in the road, his fatigue fell away as he spotted the town of Reynosa in the distance. “At last. Not long now and I’ll get off this nag and sleep in a soft bed tonight.”
A little while later he rode across the plaza to a small adobe brick building, opposite from the town’s only church. The guards patrolling around the largest building in town drew his attention. No doubt the objects of the reason he had spent nearly two weeks on the back of that flea-bitten horse were ensconced within.
He grabbed the saddlebags and walked through the building’s open door and found himself in a tiny office that under normal times housed the office of the town’s alcalde. Since the beginning of the most recent campaign into the rebel province of Texas, the office was where Morales’ equally junior counterpart, Lieutenant Estevan Alameda conducted business for the understrength company charged with guarding the supply depot and prisoners. Against one corner of the room was crammed a small desk, and opposite from it was a narrow cot. There was less than a couple of feet between the sparse furnishings. On the cot, Morales found the other officer, lying down with a white handkerchief covering his face. Every few seconds the small piece of cloth fluttered up as Alameda snored.
Morales began to set the saddlebags on the desk, but then thinking better of it, he plopped them heavily on his fellow officer’s chest. Lieutenant Alameda snorted and coughed before reflexively brushing the leather bags onto the floor. The dust-covered Morales stood over the startled Alameda, laughing. “Wake up, old boy!”
The other officer rolled off the cot and stood, crowding Morales’ space, as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What the hell was that about, Javier?”
Morales scooped the saddlebags from the floor and deposited them on the desk. “You should have seen the look on your face, Estevan. You’d have thought that the devil had come to collect your poor soul.”
Alameda managed a severe glare in the direction of his friend and fellow officer. They had grown close while cadets at the Colegio Militar at Chapultepec. Ultimately, he couldn’t stay mad and he sat back down on the cot and began pulling his boots on. “What’s the news from Tampico?”
Morales unfastened the leather straps on the saddlebag then dumped a few letters on the desk. He plucked one from the small pile and handed over the sealed envelope. “If you’re still the commander of the Reynosa garrison, such as it is, this one’s for you.”
Alameda chuckled. “This is one hell of a garrison, Javier. Me and forty soldiers. It’s good that our northern neighbors are otherwise busy being properly educated by General Woll, lest they cast their hungry eyes our way.” He pulled a penknife from his pocket and broke the wax seal and perused the letter’s contents.
The letter slipped from his fingers and drifted to the ground, landing on Morales’ boot. His friend picked up the letter and handed it back to him. He then looked into Lieutenant Alameda’s face and saw its pallor. Alameda pursed his lips and shook his head.
Perplexed, Morales asked, “What’d it say?”
Alameda wordlessly handed the letter to his friend and sat heavily on the cot while the courier read the letter.
From the office of his Excellency Antonio López de Santa Anna
To the Commander, Garrison at Reynosa
You are hereby ordered to execute general order number 77, signed by this office on the 9th of January 1842. Any pirates caught under the rebel flag of the North Americans is to be summarily executed, by order of the office of the presidency.
Antonio López de Santa Anna
Morales gently set the letter down on the desk. Alameda frowned as his color returning to his cheeks. But he struggled with his words, still dumbfounded by the letter’s contents. “Who? How did they find out so quickly about the prisoners, Javier?”
The other officer shrugged. “I doubt that his Excellency actually knows you have them here, Estevan. Yours is the third letter I have delivered since leaving Tampico, and I have another just like it for whomever is holding Laredo. I think his Excellency is simply being thorough.”
Alameda trembled, his hands shaking as he began to consider what needed to be done to carry out the fateful orders. He struggled to put on a brave face for his friend. His voice tremored as he said, “I don’t suppose I could carry that last letter for you to Laredo, eh, Javier?”
An unpleasant duty behind him, the other young lieutenant slapped him on the back, “Not for anything you’ve got, Estevan.”
***
The next morning, the church doors were thrown open, slamming against the walls, waking Sergeant Mejia as the noise echoed in the church’s close confines. He climbed to his feet as he watched the young Mexican army officer, in command of the Reynosa garrison, walk through the doors, accompanied by a squad of soldados. In heavily accented English, he said, “You all have fifteen minutes to prepare. I’ve been ordered to send you on to Tampico, and from there to Veracruz.” The officer turned sharply about and strode out the church, leaving the squad behind.
Mejia eyed the soldados warily, uncertain what to make of the announcement. Perhaps General Woll had finally gotten around to getting them ready to ship to the United States. If that were true, what did it mean was happening in Texas? Had the French General in the pay of Mexico defeated Johnston’s men at the Alamo? With so many unknowns rattling around in his mind, Mejia grabbed the one positive thought. It would be good to see the sun overhead. Holding on to that thought, he turned to helping his men prepare to leave the church’s cramped quarters.
As the emaciated Texians emerged from the church, they squinted as the April morning sunlight filled the town’s plaza, where they were forced to line up. The town’s entire garrison was assembled in the plaza, surrounding the prisoners.
The young lieutenant sat on a chestnut mare, wearing a stern countenance, as the men were lined up in a column of twos. As they were herded out of the plaza and onto a road leading south, the soldados from the Reynosa garrison marched on both sides of the prisoners. Bayonet-tipped muskets were slung over their shoulders, as they set a demanding pace. The road south was nothing more than a hard-packed wagon trail, and the Texians struggled to keep up with their guards.
As best as he was able, Sergeant Mejia tried to encourage his fellow soldiers to maintain the grueling pace. He worried his men would be dead on their feet when they arrived at wherever the Mexicans intended to stay for the night. That thought led to another. The soldados escorting them carried no backpacks. If they were sending him and his men to Tampico, why were they not carrying packs?
After a little more than an hour’s march, the column stopped. He helped the soldier who’d been beside him to the ground. The other man was still recovering from his wounds. Mejia looked around and found the young officer at the back of the column, deep in conversation with an older sergeant. He felt a sense of alarm growing within. He had expected the soldados to push them along the road with few breaks. When the young officer finished talking to his NCO, instead of relaxing, the soldados became tenser. Every warning bell in Mejia’s head was sounding off, when the guards to the prisoners’ left crossed over the road, joining their compat
riots to the right of Mejia’s men.
With little warning, the entire force of soldados came together in a single line and raised their bayoneted muskets to their shoulders.
Too late, everything fell into place. How could he have been so stupid? Mejia screamed out, “Run, boys! They’re going to kill us!”
As the exhausted Texians reacted to his warning, forty muskets fired into the mass of men at point-blank range. Mejia involuntarily ducked when he felt a bullet zoom by his head. He crouched down and saw most of his company fall to the ground, dead or wounded. The soldados, bayonets fixed to their weapons, leveled their muskets, and started in among his men. To the open side of the road, Mejia sprinted, trying to ignore the stitch of pain in his leg, but each time his left foot pounded into the soil, he winced. He dodged a prickly pear cactus and stepped around a thorn bush. He chanced a look behind and saw the soldados bayoneting men on the road. A couple other Texians, to his right and left were, like him, trying to flee into the desert.
Thinking there was strength in numbers, Mejia angled to his left, with the idea of connecting with his nearest compatriot in a few hundred yards. Behind him, he heard a scattering of musket shots and saw a bullet kick up dust a few feet to his front. But the man he was veering toward stumbled and fell, a red mist exploded from where the bullet slammed into his back.
Too breathless to swear at the soldados behind him, Mejia renewed his focus on putting one foot in front of the other as fast as he could flee the danger behind him.
Five minutes or ten, he wasn’t sure, but with his heart thundering in his chest, Mejia slowed to a walk for a few seconds then stopped. His left leg spasmed in pain. Even though largely healed, the running had taken a toll on his leg. He turned and looked behind him. There was no one he could see in pursuit. He figured he must have put at least a mile between him and the massacre back on the road. Thinking about all his companions lying dead on that dusty road brought tears unbidden to his eyes. They ran into his beard. Those men back there had been his responsibility and he had failed them. It would have been better for them to have died at their post back on the Rio Grande than to die at the hand of Mexican treachery.
The tears continued, even as his breathing returned to normal. He had to escape and tell people back in Texas what had happened, he owed it to his companions. His best guess was that the river was only a few miles away. He had to hurry. Surely the garrison commander knew that if he made good his escape, word of the massacre would travel far. With each step north, he knew that even the river wouldn’t provide the safety he needed.
***
The haze of gunpowder was gone before Lieutenant Estevan Alameda dismounted, a gentle southerly breeze seemed eager to rid the air of the acrid smell of smoke. But the cloying smell of blood lingered, resisting the wind’s effort to cleanse the air.
A Texian, with a bullet hole in his chest, stared with vacant eyes at him as he stepped amid the carnage along the road. Alameda jerked away from those accusing eyes, as his stomach threatened to disgorge his breakfast. This was the first time he’d witnessed death since graduating from the Colegio Militar. This was as far removed from the glorious and heroic images of war as he could imagine. He swallowed, trying to keep the contents in his stomach down. He had grown up imagining war was glorious cavalry charges, sweeping Mexico’s enemies aside and riding to victory, trampling over the enemy’s flag. But there was no glory in watching helpless men being slaughtered. Especially those who had honorably surrendered. No, there was no glory in this.
His men cleared the dead from the road, dragging them into the ditch. His ranking non-commissioned officer, Eduardo Hernandez appeared from the other side of the road, carrying a couple of ragged brown jackets. He cast a look at the bodies along the roadside. As a veteran of Santa Anna’s earlier campaigns, crushing rebellions across northern Mexico, he took it in stride. He’d seen this before. In place of a salute, he offered the jackets to the young lieutenant, “Sir, we’ve accounted for all the rebels except one. We killed two who attempted to escape, but I’m pretty sure, their sergeant, the Tejano, escaped.”
Alameda was sick. His eyes kept returning to the long line of bodies beside the road. This wasn’t war. But he held his tongue, certain his sergeant wouldn’t understand. Instead, he pointed toward the dead bodies, “Perhaps we should send a few men back into town and fetch some of the men to help us bury them.”
Sergeant Hernandez eyed him circumspectly. “It’s your call, sir. But if I may, perhaps I should have the boys drag them further into the field. They can build a pyre and burn the bodies. I’m sure that we’ll capture our missing Tejano, but the fewer folks who know of today’s actions, the better it might go, if General Woll isn’t successful.”
The lieutenant wanted to scream. It wasn’t enough that they had murdered these men, now it was necessary to burn the evidence and find and silence the one who escaped. He shook his head, this certainly wasn’t what he signed up for. He turned his back on the sergeant and swung in the saddle. “As you say, Sergeant Hernandez. Assign the corporals to oversee the absolution of our sin here and take a couple of men with you and find that Tejano. Don’t let him get away.”
Chapter 20
6th of April 1842
Water dripped from his threadbare, faded jacket as he crouched behind a cypress tree. He was soaked, water puddling at his feet, but at least he was on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. His last half hour on the Mexican side of the river, he felt as though he was not alone. Now, as he gazed back across the river, he thought he saw flashes of red and blue moving among the Montezuma cypress growing along the southern bank. Sergeant Julio Mejia remained hidden behind the large native tree when he saw a soldado approach the shoreline.
It was the sergeant from the Reynosa garrison. He walked along the bank of the water, eyes riveted to the ground, evidently looking for where Mejia had entered the river. While he walked along the edge of the river, a couple more men appeared alongside, and joined him in his search for any evidence Mejia may have left as to where he crossed the river.
The Tejano cast a fleeting look at a large branch lying on the shoreline less than a dozen yards away. It had only washed up a little while earlier, after Mejia had pushed it into the water up river and used it to swim across. It was possible, if the Mexicans continued on their current path for a few hundred more yards, they would find where he’d dragged the large cypress branch into the water. As they moved away, he rose from his hiding place and began following the river, heading east, toward his goal more than sixty miles away, Fort Brown, on the mouth of the Rio Grande.
He hurried his pace as much as he dared, as the sun began to set behind him. With no food, and only the questionable water source of the river to quench his thirst, it was best to keep moving as late into the evening as possible. He stepped around a copse of mesquite trees and looked behind him. There was every possibility he was being followed. He stepped up his pace and kept walking long after the sun had fled the sky.
***
A boot slid through the grass only a few feet away from where Mejia was lying down behind a fallen oak tree. He’d passed through nearly sixty miles of the Rio Grande Valley. Surely the Texian fort was only a mile or two away, and here he was, trapped behind the fallen trunk, listening to the footfalls getting closer.
He briefly closed his eyes, wondering how he had wound up here. It was around sunrise on the second day after the massacre when he determined he wasn’t the only one moving eastward along the shoreline of the river. On several occasions he had turned, looking behind him and saw a flash of metal, and a glimpse of a blue and red uniform.
The weeks in the church-turned-prison had sapped his strength, but he had forced himself to press onward. Everything since his escape would be in vain if he were caught. He owed it to the murdered men of his company, to make it back to Texas and tell people what had happened.
The boot stopped. It was close by. He could smell the stench of sweat on the woolen jacket
worn by whomever was on the opposite side of the tree trunk.
Mejia willed himself to be still, taking the smallest breaths as possible, as he attempted to listen to the slightest change. The boots shifted, and grass rustled, but if it was the Mexican sergeant opposite him, he wasn’t moving away enough for him to risk a deeper breath. As his eyes were closed, in his mind, he saw his men lying dead in that dusty road. Their eyes stared at him, accusing.
He had replayed the massacre in his mind repeatedly as he had hurried toward Fort Brown. He should have noticed the Mexicans were without their packs, that it was an execution into which he and his men had been led. Tears came unbidden. It seemed like every time he closed his eyes, the men from Company N accused him, blaming him for their murders.
The leather soles resumed sliding across the grass, as they circled around the small clearing, on the side of which lay the fallen oak tree. It had to be the cagey sergeant. Maybe the other soldados had been sent back to report on their progress. Mejia could only speculate. But he was sure, the one still following him was the persistent non-commissioned officer.
The images in Mejia’s head fled back into the recesses of his mind when he opened his eyes again. This cat and mouse game had to end. He pressed his body more closely against the tree trunk, willing himself to be invisible. His eyes were open, looking into the blue sky, but all he could see were the accusing eyes of his former comrades. Their blood called out to him, as he hid from his pursuer. The boots had gone silent, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t take the voices in his head crying for vengeance any longer.
He sat up and saw over the trunk. It was the Mexican sergeant. His back was turned, at the other side of the clearing. It looked like the man was relieving himself. His musket was propped against a tree within arm’s length of where he stood.
Noiselessly, the Tejano rose to his feet, and stepped over the log. The other man was, for the moment, oblivious to Mejia’s presence behind him.
