by James Blake
He walked a long way down the waterfront with his collar turned up against a chill breeze. He did not desire conversation and so chose a saloon he had not patronized before and where no one knew him. He drank by himself at the end of the bar, downing three slow mugs of ale before taking his leave at just after two o’clock, a pleasant tingle on his lips. The wind had come up and carried a heavy smell of impending rain. The misty lamp-lit streets lay deserted to the late hour and the coming storm.
He had his head down against the wind as he turned a corner—and collided with a large man coming from the other direction, his forehead striking the man in the face, jarring him rearward and bringing blood from his nose. The man’s instant reaction was to yell “Bastard!” and lash out with the truncheon in his hand, striking Samuel Thomas on the ear and knocking off his hat. Samuel Thomas yelped and punched at the man in reflex but missed, and the man rushed at him, flailing in a fury, driving him back against a wall. Then the derringer was in Samuel Thomas’s hand and the pistol cracked with a yellow flash—the first time he’d fired a gun in his life—and the half-inch ball punched through the man’s neck and rang off a lamppost. The man’s head slumped like a puppet’s snipped of its string and his hat rolled off and his body raced it to the ground. Staring at the sprawled figure and the black ribbons of blood unspooling along the cobblestone seams, Samuel Thomas knew the man was dead, and a chaos of sensations coursed through him. Then he saw the watchman brassard on the man’s arm and was jolted with cold dread. He looked all about and saw no one. Then snatched up his hat and ran.
He’d gone two blocks before realizing he still had the gun in his hand and he flung it high onto a rooftop. His ear throbbed and felt to his fingers like a chunk of peeled fruit. He kept to the shadows as he hurried through the empty streets and without destination other than away from the harbor. He held his hat to his head against the strengthening wind and felt the first pricks of rain on his face—and then it was slapping into him in gusting swirls.
His thoughts were a turmoil. What if there were a witness, someone who had been looking on from the shadows? What if there were inquiries at the sailors’ inns and it was learned at the Yardarm of a guest of his description, Samuel Wolfe by name, who had gone out and not returned even to retrieve his carpetbag? He remembered now that his carpetbag still held the photograph of himself and his brother and he had a moment’s frantic impulse to return for it—then cursed himself for a fool and hastened on. To report to the Atropos was out of the question. Someone might check the crew rosters of all ships in harbor. The more he pondered his plight the worse it seemed. Homicide was in any instance a grave matter but the killing of a watchman always roused an outrage. He had once read a newspaper account of a Boston sailor who killed a watchman in a fight and then fled, fearing no one would believe his claim of self-defense. He was shortly run to ground by manhunters seeking the posted reward and his fear was borne out. Although none of the witnesses could say how the fight had started, and though he swore before God and jurymen that he had only been defending himself against a severe and unjustified attack, he was judged guilty of murder and hanged.
Samuel Thomas was sure the bountymen would soon be on his track. He thought to keep walking until he was clear of Portsmouth and into the woods. But then what? He turned at the next corner for no reason other than a fugitive’s instinct to vary his course. And saw up ahead and across the street a handful of men huddled in their coats and standing against the wall in front of an office with a sign identifying it as a recruiting post for the Army of the United States.
It was still raining hard when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the office, giving merry praise to such patriotism as would abide a drenching in order to serve its country. They all went inside and formed a line in front of the sergeant’s desk. When it was Samuel Thomas’s turn before the sergeant and he was asked his name, he said, “Thomas, Samuel Thomas,” believing the alias a clever one, false only in its lack of complete truth. The recruiter began to write it down. “And what’s the middle initial, Mr Thomas?”
He was unprepared for that. “It’s, ah . . . H.” The first letter that came to mind.
The sergeant smiled and entered it. Then looked up again and studied Samuel Thomas’s battered ear. “What was it she hit you with, lad, a fry pan? Well, it’s off to a better mistress now, you can be sure. She’ll clothe ye and feed ye and give ye a rifle. A goodly more than most will do, now aint it?”
Before noon he and seven other enlistees were on a recruiting wagon bound for Fort Hamilton in New York. He had decided he would not write to John Roger for a long while. He could not trust anyone to carry a letter to him without reading it—or worse, permitting it to fall into the wrong hands and be of help to manhunters.
His plan was to hide in the army for a year or so, long enough for the bountymen to give up their search. Then he would desert. He would go to the nearest port and under another name sign on with a ship for New England. He would seek out John Roger in Hanover and apologize for his long silence and explain everything to him.
Such, in any case, was his plan.
THE TURNCOAT’S TRIALS
In February of 1845 the United States annexed the nine-year-old Republic of Texas and six months later was still in diplomatic dispute with Mexico over the location of the border between the two countries. The U.S. insisted, as Texas always had, that the border was the Rio Grande. And as always, Mexico insisted it was at the Nueces River, more than a hundred miles north. But it had now become obvious that President James Knox Polk’s greater ambition was to acquire the necessary territory to expand the Yankee republic all the way to the Pacific. Acquire it by whatever means necessary. Newspapers across the country carried heated opinions on both sides of the issue. At the same time that the president was proposing diplomatic resolutions to the border argument—all of them so unfavorable to Mexico that it could never agree to them—he dispatched the benignly named Army of Observation under the command of General Zachary Taylor to the mouth of the Nueces River. Taylor’s ostensible purpose was to protect Texas against Mexican invasion, but as everyone knew, including the Mexicans, Mr Polk was in fact making ready an invasion of his own.
Even before taking refuge in the ranks, Samuel Thomas had been aware of the war talk. But the risk of combat in Mexico seemed a lesser one than facing a murder charge in Portsmouth. He was not the only one in the company on the run from legal complications, and there were of course patriots in the ranks, and no shortage of callow youths in quest of battlefield glory, but the majority of his comrades had enlisted for the ageless reason of escape from poverty. A number of them had arrived on immigrant ships, mostly Irishmen fled from the Famine. But the America they’d landed in was predominantly Protestant and of English stock, and its larger cities were hotbeds of nativist loathing of the foreign tide staining its shores, especially of the Paddies and their slavish papist faith. It was a hatred no less virulent than what the Hibernians had endured in Britain and as much a barrier to any but the most abject jobs. Rather than dig privies or scrounge in the streets for survival, many of them enlisted in the army, believing it a lesser adversity.
In late winter their regiment at last received the order to join General Taylor in Texas. For most of the company, and certainly for Samuel Thomas, who had never been outside New Hampshire before his enlistment, the journey from New York to the Gulf of Mexico was an education in American geography and regional societies. Traversing a countryside early thawing to mud, they were transported by wagons to Pittsburgh and there put aboard a sternwheel steamboat that carried them west along the Ohio River and through country budding with incipient greenery. Where the Ohio joined the Mississippi they transferred onto a side-wheeler for the trip south. The Old Man, the boatmen called the great river, and Samuel Thomas was awestruck by its breadth. The country they passed through grew more distinct from that which they left behind. The dense woodlands along the banks occasionally gave way to verdant pasturelands and fields of bla
ck earth so fertile he could smell it from the railing. He saw turtles the size of saddlebags sunning themselves on mud banks and driftwood. Saw a bald eagle high on a pine eviscerating a limp panther cub in its talons. Saw a trio of boys hauling onto the bank a hooked catfish bigger than any of them.
They churned downriver through days of surpassing loveliness and then entered an unseasonable heat broken by sporadic rainfall. When they were not sopped with rain they were sodden with sweat. They passed by a sequence of port towns and made brief moorings at some of them for fuel and supplies. Towns loud and rough and seeming like foreign countries, so profuse were they with Negroes, with the drawling speech of blacks and whites alike. The river journey ended at New Orleans, where they passed two joyous days and nights and Samuel Thomas spent the best two dollars of his life for the pleasures of an octoroon girl with caramel skin and nipples dark as chocolate and a mouth like red fruit. It was said the city suffered from chronic afflictions of fire and flood and devastating storm, that it was notorious for yellow fever and murder and every sort of carnal delinquency. But Samuel Thomas fancied its bohemian character and exuberant wickedness, and he felt somehow more at home in his two days there than he’d ever felt in Portsmouth. He thought he might someday return to stay.
They shipped out on the steamship Alabama. His first view of the Gulf of Mexico was under a low morning sun that made an undulant gold of the water’s surface. He was struck by the dissimilarity of smell from the North Atlantic, the squalling gulls of different cry and character from those of New England. The pelicans were a novel entertainment—graceful on the wing, but in repose so like comical, jowly, big-bottomed bureaucrats. The ship steamed into the gulf under high billowing clouds of dazzling white, and the mainland shrank from view off the starboard.
The weather held well. They were four days on the placid sea before sighting the dark line of the Texas coast. They moored that evening off the shallows of Corpus Christi Bay, the army campfires on the beach glimmering like a fallen rain of stars. In the morning they debarked onto lighters and were ferried ashore. The ship’s crew had already told them much about this badland of winter northers sharp as razors and endless sweltering summers, about the hordes of insects and rattlesnakes, the scourge of cactus and thorny brush, the sand storms that could blind a man sure if he were not careful of his eyes. Considering that Taylor’s army had been here since the previous summer, the new men were surprised to find the camp in high spirits and a flurry of activity. Then learned that Taylor had only an hour earlier received orders to march down to the Rio Grande, Mexican objections be damned. War had not yet been declared, but its imminence could be felt in the camp’s excitement as the soldiers got ready to move out in the morning. “You’re a right lucky bunch to be going straight to the elephant and not spend more than one night in this shithole,” a red-eyed corporal told Samuel Thomas. “A right lucky bunch.”
They set out well before sunrise, off to “see the elephant,” the day’s expression for novel adventure. An hour into the march, in the gray light of dawn, Samuel Thomas got his first look at General Taylor, Old Rough and Ready himself, as he rode his white horse past the column. Craggy-faced, clad in a checkered shirt and coarse pants held up by suspenders, shod in brogans and wearing a tattered straw hat. “Looks like a damned farmer, don’t he?” said a grinning man marching next to Samuel Thomas. “But there aint no better general in the whole army.”
Day after day they marched from dawn to just before sundown, trekking through sun and wind and rain, through sandy flatland covered with mesquites and bramble and thorny scrub brush of all sorts. Three weeks after departing Corpus Christi they arrived at the Rio Grande. Taylor ordered construction to begin at once on a fort directly across from Matamoros and its garrison of Mexican lancers. He christened it Fort Texas, though one of his officers said they should call it Dogtown in deference to all the scrawny mutts at large in the vicinity. It would be two years yet before that raw riparian ground gave rise to the hamlet of Brownsville, but thus was Samuel Thomas the first of the Wolfes to set foot there.
He was there only a short time. On the march from Corpus Christi he had cultivated a hatred of the army far exceeding that of most enlisted men. The root of his antipathy had been planted at Fort Hamilton when he was caught dicing in the wagon shed with two other trainees. All the next day, under guard and in full view of the camp, the three of them were made to stand atop upright barrels on a layer of shattered bricks. It was a constant strain to maintain balance on the unsteady barrelheads, and each man several times fell to the broken brick. At sunset they were helped off the barrels, bruised and aching, bloody of knees and hands, and would be stiff-jointed for days. The punishment made Samuel Thomas resentful, but its severity paled in contrast to what he witnessed on the way to Fort Texas and during his time there. While he understood that severe offenses called for severe punishments, he was enraged by the stark cruelty of some of the penalties inflicted for minor infractions. It was one thing to flog a man bloody for sleeping on guard, quite another to lash him for failure to salute an officer. Or to brand him on the forehead with the “HD” of the habitual drunkard because he stood too tipsy at morning muster. A rifle laxly carried or a tunic improperly buttoned, a surly glance at an officer, an insufficient alacrity in obeying a command—and a soldier could find himself straddling a sawhorse for hours with his hands tied behind him and weights attached to his ankles. Or lugging a ball and chain for a week. Or wearing a heavy iron collar affixed with spokes that made it impossible to lay his head down for sleep. Or passing a few hours sitting bucked and gagged on the ground—immobilized with his knees drawn up and his arms bound around them and a stout stick set crosswise under the knees and over the arms.
In an army whose officers were largely nativist and Protestant, it was only natural that the most maltreated in the ranks were Irishmen, three of whom—Jack Riley, John Little, and Lucas Malone—Samuel had become friends with during the southward march. Though he had no giveaway accent, he had at once been taken for Irish by Riley, and he admitted to an Irish grandfather. In keeping daily company with these men, Samuel Thomas began to assume a mild brogue, though he was unaware of it until they were almost to the Rio Grande and Lucas Malone said, “Listen to this lad, willya? Bedamn if he’s not sounding like he was weaned in County Cork.”
Malone and John Little hated the army with even greater fervor than Samuel Thomas did. Both of them had been punished harshly numerous times, for one offense or another. Both had undergone the buck and gag, and Little had once worn the spiked collar, and Malone had taken a ride on the sawhorse on their first day at the Rio Grande. And though he’d never yet been physically punished, Jack Riley was no less galled than either of them. He had served almost ten years in the British army and earned a sergeant’s stripes even in the face of English bigotry, then had mustered out and migrated to America and joined the Yankee ranks, confident that his military experience would soon win him another sergeancy as well as the respect denied him in Her Majesty’s service. But he found the Irish were as much scorned by the Yanks as by John Bull, and in the six months since his American enlistment he had grown convinced he would never become a sergeant. As a man of sizable self-esteem, it enraged him to be rebuked by college-boy officers not half the soldier he was. The injury to his pride cut deep as a whip.
They had been on the Rio Grande four days when the corporal in charge of Samuel Thomas’s labor detail shot a nearby dog for no reason but boredom. The gut-wounded animal screamed and ran a short distance and fell down but kept trying to run, yowling and turning in a tight circle on the blood-muddying ground for an interminable half minute before John Little drove a pick through its head to end its misery. The corporal was recharging his pistol and didn’t notice Samuel Thomas stalking toward him until too late to avoid the punch that knocked him sprawling with two dislodged teeth. It was Samuel Thomas’s intention to kick the man to death but before he could commence he was subdued by others, including Malone, w
ho hissed into his ear, “Hold enough, lad! Put the boot to him and you’ll be fucked most truly.”
That evening he was convicted of assault on a non-commissioned officer and was sentenced to the loss of six months’ wages, disqualification for promotion for two years, and a week of the buck and gag from daybreak to sunset.
For much of the following week Fort Texas was pounded by rainstorms, and Samuel Thomas was soaked without respite as he sat trussed and gagged in the mud, seething in his fury. On the third day of his punishment, the camp woke to find its soggy grounds littered with leaflets strewn by infiltrators in the night. Printed in English and signed by the Mexican commander in Matamoros, the flyers exhorted immigrant Yankee soldiers, especially the Catholics, to reject the imperialistic mission of the slave-owning, Protestant United States and join with anti-slavery Mexico in defense of its sovereignty and national faith. They promised enlistment bonuses, good pay, and land grants of 320 acres to every Yankee who would fight for the righteous Mexican side. Before the end of the day, the first desertions were reported.
Zachary Taylor was irate. He increased the number of river sentries and ordered them to shoot any man trying to cross over who refused the command to turn back. Over the next days six men would be shot in the water and four others drowned, but thirty or so would make it to the other side. When Jack Riley ambled up to where Samuel Thomas sat bucked and gagged and asked him in low voice if he was for going across, Samuel Thomas did not hesitate to nod. But he was under tent arrest every night of his week of punishment, so they had to wait until he’d completed it. Each day of the buck drove the pain deeper into the roots of his back, and when he was freed of the restraints for the seventh time he could not get to his feet without assistance and it was an agony to straighten up. Still, he was with Riley and Little and Malone that night when they sneaked along the shadows past the fort guards and crawled through the brush down to the river and eased into the water with their boots tied together and hung around their necks.
