They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  From the doorways of the adobe houses little children peered gravely at him. He heard the slap, slap, slap of their mothers’ hands making tortillas. From the fields two teams of great oxen were driven in from ploughing, the drivers carrying on their shoulders one-handled wooden ploughs. Much of Mexico was tilled by such ancient means; the peons, believing that corn and beans require warm earth, that “steel makes the ground cold” and the mules had a “cold hoof,” preferred to use wood and oxen. As he walked among the outbuildings he came to a conical stone granary with rock steps worn by generations of peon feet, and near it the circular rock wall and floor of a threshing-pit in which mules tramped out wheat. Ojos Azules was very old and had much history, he supposed. It was incongruous that American soldiers should fight in a place of such sealed and feudal peace. It was a trick played by time upon itself. They had not been properly equipped to war here. He wondered what the reaction of the Quartermaster would have been to requests from the field for armor, crossbow, and the arquebus. He wondered how the ranch came to be called Ojos Azules, or Blue Eyes. He wondered how much longer he could loiter. ‘Report,’ he ordered himself. ‘The boy does not exist. The young Captain died a Colonel and will not have to watch. The Sergeant spankers are retired. No punishment can hurt you now as it did then. So report, boy of forty.’ He straightened his hat, adjusted his glasses, turned towards the casa grande.

  A wide, covered passageway between walls three feet thick cut into the hacienda. From its dim coolness Major Thorn emerged into sun and colour of a patio. Bougainvillaea climbed the wooden pillars of portales. Centered was a second, smaller pool. Water purled from the head of a bull, long-horned. A lime tree grew to roof height. In summer there would be bees here, and the fan of hummingbirds. The silence was old-worldly. He recalled a description of the Alhambra as day closed, in a book by Washington Irving. About the patio the hacienda squared, the windows facing it small-paned and shuttered, a series of Moorish doors opening into rooms. As the officer stood, uncertain, he sensed that he was seen. Under the portale to his left sat a bird on a perch. It was some tropical variety, a macaw or toucan. Crude green, cardinal, blue, its plumage glittered in sun-ray, while its beak, enormous in proportion to its body, evilly hooked, rich as ivory, was of purest white. When Major Thorn moved towards it, pink unblinking eyes swivelled, following him, and it shifted weight on yellow claws. He put out a hand to stroke the bird, and with deliberate, almost sensual movement it seized his forefinger cruelly in its beak. Hurt, surprised, he pulled away his arm, toppling the bird from its perch so that it let go and with heavy wing-beat flew upwards to its perch, facing him inscrutably once more. He examined his finger. The sharp bill edge had broken skin.

  Across the patio a trooper lounged beside a door. The officer asked where he would find Colonel Rogers, and the soldier pointed to another open door under the portale. Major Thorn went to it, hesitated, entered.

  Unadjusted to the dimness, his eyes first made out only whitewashed walls, then a continuous bench along the outer wall covered with Indian blankets, then, in the middle, an arrangement of formal wooden furniture, straight carven chairs with leather seats along a high, narrow table. At one end of the room a stone fire-place yawned, in its face a design of Valencian tiles depicting an animal drama, a fox eating a drake. Suddenly he saw Selah Rogers. The Colonel knelt before the fire-place. He was praying. When he became aware of another presence he squinted, rose abruptly in recognition.

  “Tom!” He crossed the room on bare feet. “Tom, what are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Colonel. I’ve been with you since Trias. After Guerrero I was told . . .”

  “Tom, I have such corns you’d think my horse had been riding me. But I’ve been praying, Tom, thanking God for giving me a victory. A charge—think of it, Tom—maybe the last one for the old cavalry! How I wish your father had seen it!” Selah Rogers’s eyes watered with emotion. “This will make a whole issue of the Journal, Tom—they will cheer it on the floor of Congress! Do you realize I may have my star before the week is out? Thirty-nine years I’ve waited for today, Tom—I’m sixty-three, you know—in August they will put me out to grass. But God-in-His-goodness has let me gather the fruits of my years!”

  They stood in slanted light from a window. In a state of exultation such as this, Selah Rogers did not look his age. A small, summery man, his face was tanned and seamed as a butter-nut. Though white, his hair was thick and curly, and two tufts of it bristled from his ears.

  “You were here this morning. You didn’t fight?”

  “No, sir.”

  “All right. We can’t have that. Now come and sit.” They took chairs at one end of the long table. The Colonel asked about Boice. When Thorn told him he shook his head. “Poor lad, poor lad. Well, we must pay our tithe of sorrow. You were at Guerrero, Tom? It won’t rank with today, will it?”

  Thorn described the fight as principally long range. He said that he had found one man at Guerrero, though, for whom he had already written a citation, a private named Hetherington, and told briefly what he had done.

  “You know, Tom.” Selah Rogers drew one thin, blue-veined foot up and rubbed a toe. “This is hard for me to say—I hope you’ll take it in the proper spirit. What I’m getting at is, today will be the first good news from the campaign—Congress is apt to be in a generous mood. If they just happened to have a citation of mine to pass on—well, a victory, a retiring commander.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Why, I led this charge myself, Tom.”

  So incredible was the suggestion that to gain time Thorn revolved his hat in his hands.

  “But you were commanding,” he said carefully. “Leading the charge might be construed as line of duty.”

  “At my age? At my age most men would have let Paltz do it, and stayed with their reserve.”

  “There is nothing about age or rank in the citation, sir.”

  One of the Colonel’s hands went to his ear. He twisted the tuft of white hair into a spike.

  “You won’t do it.”

  “I don’t think I can, sir. For one thing, it might lessen the chances of the others.”

  “What others? You mean from this squadron?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was utterly the wrong time, the wrong way. “I have four of them. Lieutenant Fowler of A, the first sergeant of D, Chawk, and two privates, Trubee of C and a boy named Renziehausen out of F.”

  “Four—and the one you brought is five. Five!” The commander stared at him. “It’s impossible. It would debase the Medal. Or is that what you intend?”

  “I think I can justify all five, sir.” There was no help for it now. Placing his hat on the table, from his breast pocket he removed the oilskin envelope containing Hetherington’s citation and the penciled authorization from Pershing and took out the latter. “I am supposed to have these men taken back to Cordura, which is to be the advance base, until we hear from Washington. I have Hetherington with me now.”

  “You mean detach them? Take them from duty?”

  “Yes, sir. Just temporary transfer, to prevent them from being killed before they have the Medal, as Boice was.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Selah Rogers shot to his bare feet. “I can’t spare an able-bodied man—John Pershing would never weaken me when I’m already under strength!”

  “This is the authorization, sir.

  The Colonel snatched it, unfolded and read, then threw it on to the table and stamped roosterishly to the other end. His tanned face blackened.

  “Five,” he said, “five. And you won’t even consider the possibility of mine!”

  “I didn’t think you would ask me to, sir.”

  “Why not? And why not! I’ve done as humanly much for you as one man can do for another—more than an officer should—John Pershing and you and I and Paltz are the only ones in this life who know how much. God help you if anyone else puts two and two together! Oh, don’t misunderstand me—it was for your father, not for you. He was
a gentleman in the true sense of the word—a gentle man. When my wife was dying of malaria off San Fernando, it was your father and mother brought her ashore and nursed her through—or she’d never have lived to see Manila. Lord, my corns. I’ll have Ticknor pare them tomorrow.”

  The Major returned the envelope to his pocket. His finger hurt where the bird had bitten him.

  “They should probably start for Cordura tomorrow, sir. Can you detail an officer to take them? Fowler may be too green, I’m afraid, and. . . ”

  “Take them yourself!” Selah Rogers tugged as though he would tear the hair-spike from his ear. “They’re yours, aren’t they?”

  “Sir, I can’t operate as Awards Officer that way. There may be a fight at Pilon Cillos, and if I’m not there to see. . . ”

  “Take ‘em—it says nothing in the order about who!” The Colonel’s voice rose with rage. “And take this Geary woman, too! I have her under guard. Take her back under arrest on my charges, see that she is locked up until we can send a full report on her to Bliss. From what I once heard, she was no better than a gilded woman of the streets before she came down here—her father was Senator Adolf Geary, you’ve heard of him. But I do not sit in judgment on her. The point is, she has knowingly given aid and assistance to foreign troops engaged against the armed forces of the United States, her own country. She supplied the Mexicans and let them fight us from her property. If that isn’t treason it’s enough to revoke her citizenship—there’s something to that effect in the Loss of Nationality Act. So take her with you. I make you responsible.”

  “Sir, if I may object. How can . . .”

  “That’s an order!” Selah Rogers glared at the officer. Slowly his expression altered. “Unless you’d like to reconsider. That is, about the Medal.”

  Major Thorn took his hat from the table, re-angering the Colonel, who interpreted correctly the gesture.

  “You are not dismissed! I could give you one alternative-only one, don’t forget—and you’d crawl to Washington with a citation! I tell you the reverse is true—the sins of the sons are visited upon the fathers—how he would suffer to see you skulking at the rear—picking up the scraps from the banquets of victory!”

  Run out of rhetoric, his choler spent, the Colonel sank into a chair at his end of the table. “If I had it to do again, Tom, I never would. I would never compound it. You have to live with yourself, yes—but I have to live with what I did for you. It’s justice, I suppose—what I saved you, I cost myself.”

  Thorn stood. The room was darkening. He could just see the Colonel now, who for the first time looked his sixty-three years. The flesh of his neck was slack, wrinkled.

  “You may be a sick man, Tom—what you’re trying to do. And you can’t do it, of course—not if you write a thousand Medals.”

  Their eyes met.

  “His son. I can think of only one thing worse— you might have been mine.” Selah Rogers averted his face. “Go, Tom. I don’t care to look at you.”

  Major Thorn left the room and the casa grande. Walking swiftly he did not see the bird, watching him, move upon its perch. His body was bathed in sweat, and the cut of the twilight air made him shiver. A light flickered from the stables. That would be the surgeon with the wounded. Two months ago he might have gone to Ben, who would have whisky, and both bachelors, neither playing polo, the only sport appropriate for a cavalry officer, they might have drunk and talked of books and battles; Ben, so well read in antiquity, who knew the Stoics almost by heart. Bottle between them they might sit as they had in the nowhere of Columbus, New Mexico, desert-girt, the nearest tree seventy-five miles away at El Paso, the regiment asleep around them, the long hours forging their friendship. 0 rare Ben! He did not want to be with the surgeon now, nor anyone. He felt physically ill. ‘Paltz knows, Paltz knows.’ He counted cadence with the words. ‘That makes four—Pershing, Rogers, Paltz, Ticknor. There must be a fifth because I have five. Five I know about and five who know about me. Symmetry in art, order in war, Ben the classicist would say.’ Beside one of the outbuildings he found his blanket-roll and saddlebags and carried them through falling dark to the stone granary where he spread his blankets on a flooring of corn, yielding as a woman’s body yields, removed his boots and glasses and lay down longing for the execution of sleep.

  It did not come at once. What came was a memory of his mother. On nights when he had been spanked by stranger sergeants he would often have bad dreams, and crying in sleep would call his mother. She would lie with him and shelter him with her body, her long hair mantling him, and in the morning his hands would be so tangled in her hair, his clutch so tight that she could not rise without waking him. It had been she who told him how, since punishment was always scheduled in advance by his father, like Orders of the Day, to seal himself within himself; there would be time; then the blows upon his bared bottom would hurt another, not the one sealed. This, she said, was what the blind man did with his blindness, the lame with their affliction, the mother with her crippled child, and so braved the world with secret selves untouched. ‘This is what I have done,’ he thought. ‘Each man will respond to me according to his nature, some with anger, some with contempt, a few, it may be, with compassion. I have known it in advance; I have had six weeks to seal myself; I am my own crippled child. Let me be untouched.’

  He heard his name called twice. He answered. Hetherington’s voice entered the granary. He wondered if he could bunk with the Major. He didn’t know anybody in this regiment.

  “Besides, sir, they don’t make me much at ease.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, they know about me getting the Medal of Honor. This morning some asked me what I was doing here, and I said that was why. They took it mighty odd, Major, all day looking at me the way the meeting people used to when I’d re-cite, like they couldn’t be comfortable with me around.”

  Off stone, the private’s voice was hollow, lonely. Major Thorn lay still with surprise. Hetherington, too. Men could not easily bear any extreme, then, of climate or of conduct.

  “All right,” he said after a moment. “You can bed down anywhere you like.”

  The officer listened to blankets being spread, leggings unlaced. He seemed to listen also to Ben Ticknor’s favorite quotation, the lines from Marcus Aurelius they had learned to say together, in alcoholic unison, when night and bottle were used up: “Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull”—he could not remember here—”and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. And, to say all in a word”—here they would belch for emphasis—”everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and a vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.” He closed his eyes.

  “Major?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you’re put in for the Medal and they give it to you—do you have to take it?”

  No sooner had he asked than Hetherington wished he had not. He did not understand the officer’s anger, but he could feel his attempt to control it.

  “You do,” Major Thorn said. “You do.”

  Chapter Six

  IN dawn, while Hetherington tended to their horses, Major Thorn brought water from the pool of the terreno in an old bucket and tried to shave off his four-day growth of beard. The water was cold, his pearl-handled razor dull, and he soaped sparingly, choosing to save the last sliver of bar so that he might shave once more before they reached Cordura. He had no mirror. He nicked himself twice. Having nothing else, he stopped the blood with his shirttail.

  When they had built their own fire and were eating, Hetherington said he was sorry he had asked about taking the Medal. The officer ignored the apology. Standing to finish his coffee, he issued a number of orders. Hetherington was first of all to clean himself up, to find soap and use it. He was to check their saddlebags and get from the pack-train commander whatever was needed to make up three days’ rations. After an hour he
was to saddle their horses. They would be leaving then, taking with them four other men from this squadron on temporary duty, and under no circumstances was he, Hetherington, to say anything to them or to anyone else about why they were going.

  Troops were stirring now, cooking breakfast, watering animals, and Major Thorn went among them to find the four men, informing each one simply that he was detailed to him for a short period of duty at the new advance base, ordering him to get rations from the pack train and be ready to ride in an hour. He left each one immediately after these instructions so that there would be no opportunity for questions he did not wish to answer.

  Next he located the Lieutenant of Federales, whose name was Ramos, and conferred with him. Cordura was a three-day ride, mas o menos, more or less, from this place. The Major’s listening Spanish was fairly good, and since the Mexican was only too willing to be voluble he heard him out, trying to map in his mind. Cordura was due north, and Dublán north of that. The railway, which would be the Texas—Mexican, ran south from the border through Dublán to Cordura, then curved southeast to Chihuahua. The surest route, according to Ramos, would be to ride north two days, then turn northeast until they struck the Tex-Mex, which they could follow northwest into Cordura. The country between here and there was muy desolado.