Michener, James A. (69 page)

That night neither Macnab could sleep. Otto's head was filled with images of galloping horses, challenges at dusk, guns blazing, and a lone man leaping his horse across obstacles. His father's

visions were more controlled and much more sober; he saw a beleaguered Texas, chaotically led, staggering and fumbling its way toward liberty, and he saw the irresistible logic of Bonham's plea: 'Unite with us! Help us! Give us the time we need till Texas mobilizes.'

All night these words rang in his ears, growing more forceful with each reiteration, until, toward dawn, he rose and walked alone beside the river that he had grown to love. It was peaceful now, a beautiful river, home of birds and haven for thirsty animals, and it had become a real home for him. Looking up to the branches of the trees that stood along its bank, he could see debris from the last terrible flood, many feet above his head. Texas is in flood, he told himself as the sun rose, and no one can predict where the debris will finally rest.

At breakfast he told Josefina: 'Otto and I better get ready to leave.' When she asked: 'For what?' he told her in Spanish: 'We must go to Goliad.'

'To fight against my people?'

'Your people are fighting against us.'

She sat down 7 with her apron brought to her face as if to hide tears, and said sorrowfully: i think maybe so,' but what it was she truly thought, she did not confide.

She was further distressed when Otto left, obviously to say I farewell to Maria Campbell, whom he loved first and strongest, but { at noon, when the boy returned, she and Finlay had all things J packed, and the two Macnabs headed southwest for the presidio at Goliad.

On leap year day, General Santa Anna's equerry came to I Benito Garza and said: 'I want you to find some soldier, about | thirty years old, who could look like a priest.'

'Why?'

'Do as you're told.'

So Garza wandered among the troops looking for someone who might resemble a priest if properly garbed, and by chance he came j upon a real priest serving the troops, a Father Palacio, whom he & took to the adjutant.

To Garza's surprise, the officer was infuriated, and although he I tried to mask his rage while the priest was present, as soon as the I clergyman departed he slapped Garza across the face and shouted: 'Do as you're told, damn you.' Benito was so astonished by this insulting treatment that he resumed his search in anger and finally found a rather fat fellow who looked as if he might play the drunken friar in a barracks-room comedy put on by locals.

Leading him like a child to the equerry, Garza said hopefully: 'I think this one will do,' and to his relief the officer said: 'So do I. Now find him the clothes.'

'What clothes?' Benito asked, and again the equerry started to slap him, but this time Benito grabbed the man's wrist, twisting it savagely as he whispered in a shaking voice: 'You do that again, I kill you.'

The young officer, stunned that a man he took to be a peasant should behave so, reached forward as if to strike Garza, but when he saw Benito's flaring nostrils and grim eyes, he drew back. In a chastened voice he said: 'We need some priest's clothes.' This proved a more difficult task, but after more than an hour spent searching, Benito came upon an old woman in the main plaza who said that a priest who had once boarded in her house had died. She found remnants of his habit, and when it was fitted to the fat soldier he did indeed look like a priest.

Garza knocked on the equerry's door, and when that officer saw the soi-disant priest he was delighted: 'Just what we need!' And he hurried both Garza and the priest down Soledad Street to the Veramendi house, where, in the old courtyard with the fountain playing, a wedding party had assembled.

Benito met the bride, a lively, attractive girl of nineteen whose mother had succeeded in protecting her from half a dozen officers who had tried to capture her: 'She marries, this one, and that's the only way.' Refusing even colonels any access to her daughter, she had proclaimed repeatedly that she and her mother before her were ladies of high quality and rigorous morals, and that she intended keeping her daughter that way. In the end, apparently, some officer had surrendered and proposed marriage, but it was clear to Garza and to the equerry at least, that the wedding was to be a cynical charade performed by a fake priest.

Benito was indignant at this, for the woman and her daughter were respectable mexicanas, and here the mexicano army was treating them with the same contempt the Texicans did. He had expected better from Santa Anna's men. The general himself had repeatedly expressed to Garza his respect for the locals, assuring him that once the norteamericanos were evicted, men like Garza would assume command and make Tejas a rich and leading province within the mexicano system. Benito thought it a good thing that Santa Anna did not know of this burlesque, for he was sure the general would have halted it.

But at this moment cheers erupted and all heads turned admiringly to greet the lucky bridegroom, who marched sedately from the interior of the palace, bestowing nods and smiles on all. It was

Santa Anna himself, solidly married in Xalapa, with numerous children and with at least seven mistresses in the capital. As the tedious siege had worn on, day after day, he felt he needed amusement and had found it in the person of this lively lass who seemed to reciprocate his feelings, but her mother had imposed such a rigorous regime, never allowing her daughter a moment to herself, that in disgust Santa Anna had proposed marriage, an honorable gesture which threw the mother into paroxysms of joy.

i could tell you were a perfect gentleman,' she assured him, and he indulged her when she wanted to make the wedding a gala affair, but he had put his foot down when she proposed to invite the entire mexicano population of Bejar to the ceremony—'To relieve the boredom of the fighting,' she had said—because he feared that some civilian would be aware that he was already married and would condemn this mock wedding as a fake.

As he stepped into the center of the crowd he bowed low before the fatuous mother, kissed her hand reverently, and said: 'This is the happiest day of my life,' and she responded: 'With me the same.'

And so the preposterous wedding party formed, there in the lovely Yeramendi gardens where )im Bowie had often sat with his beloved Ursula, and the bogus priest was moved forward, mumbling some lines and fumbling with a Bible, and the fat fellow, who really did look the part, pronounced the handsome couple man and wife. When he added: 'You may now kiss the bride,' Santa Anna swept the willing young lady into his arms and carried her into the adobe palace, where the marriage was consummated within minutes.

For many tumultuous hours the newlyweds stayed in their room, uttering squeals and chuckles that seeped out into the hallways, where the adoring mother relished each echo, and then late in the afternoon of Tuesday. 1 March, the general appeared in the garden, his uniform pressed by his new mother-in-law, to issue a rapid chain of commands.

Protected by a convoy of soldiers who could be spared from the siege, his bride was to be taken immediately south to San Luis Potosi, where she was to be given every consideration; he had reason to hope that she was pregnant, and if so, he wanted the child to be treated at least as generously as his other bastards. His mother-in-law was to be given the best house in Bejar and a pension, and to be kept as far removed from him as possible.

Now he plunged vigorously into preparations for bringing the siege to a rousing conclusion. Summoning his aides, he learned

from them the gratifying news that through late arrivals his army had now grown to twenty-four hundred effectives: 'Excellent. They have a hundred and fifty. Our superiority, sixteen-to-one.'

'Excuse me, Excellency. While you were'—the colonel hesitated—'resting, about thirty additional rebels slipped into the mission. We believe they now have about a hundred and eighty.'

'Fools,' Santa Anna muttered. 'Fighting to commit suicide.' Recalculating his figures, he came up with the accurate discrepancy: Thirteen of us to every rebel.' It was obvious that he could charge the walls head-on if he was willing to waste the manpower.

When it became evident that the siege was not going to force the rebels to surrender in the near future, since they had all the beef they needed and more than enough water from their two wells, Santa Anna summoned General Ripperda and said graciously: 'You were right. We'll have to storm the walls.' But before issuing the final order, which could entail the loss of perhaps a thousand of his men, he wanted to see for himself the exact state of preparation at the Alamo, so on March fourth he asked his brother-in-law General Cos and three scouts including Garza to take a long ride with him around the former mission. As they crossed the little bridge leading to the east side of the river, Benito cautioned the dictator: 'Excellency, do not ride carelessly. Remember, those men in there have what they call Kentucky rifles.'

'Every army thinks it has superior weapons.'

'But these are superior.'

'Son, I fought these rebels at Medina in 1813. They possessed nothing to fear, not even personal bravery. We fired at them and they ran.'

'Excellency, have you ever seen a Kentucky rifle in action?' When Santa Anna said 'No,' Benito told him: 'This is one. I bought it from a Kentucky man himself. How far do you think it can fire with accuracy?'

Santa Anna, always interested in firearms, said authoritatively: 'Our muskets, in good condition, ninety yards, maybe a hundred.'

'More like sixty,' Cos said.

'See that tree?' Garza asked. 'With the paper under it. Maybe some bottles. How far?'

The officers agreed that it might be as much as two hundred and fifty yards. 'Watch,' Benito said, and with careful aim he sped a bullet right into the collection of trash, throwing paper and bits of glass high in the air.

incredible,' Santa Anna said, drawing away from the still-distant Alamo.

'And remember, Excellency. The norteamericanos established a rule in their two wars against the British: "Always fire for the gold." '

'And what does that mean?'

'My frontier friends told me: "Never fire aimlessly. Never fire at the common soldier. Always aim at the gold decoration of the officer." Today you are wearing your gold medals, Excellency.'

Prudently, the little party moved to a distance of about three hundred yards, where, with a map, they circled the huge grounds of the Alamo, and as they rode from south to north the three scouts relayed to Santa Anna the information they had accumulated:

'The fortified main gate at the south will be impossible to breach. This long west wall is only adobe, but it's very thick. Rooms inside. You can see the patrol already on the roof. This north wall slopes at an angle and is not very stout. Difficult to climb, but our cannon could breach it, for certain.

'Here on the east, a very stout wall, don't try to force it. Those big square things are cattle pens, and the garden with one of the wells. Barracks there for the soldiers. If you try to break in here, you have to penetrate two sets of walls.

'And now the chapel of the old mission. No roof, but extremely thick walls I doubt they will waste much time defending this, because even if we did break through, we wouldn't be anywhere. But that stretch which connects the chapel to the main south wall could prove to be their weak spot and our big opportunity.

'Look 1 It has no wall of any kind. Only a ditch in front, wooden palisades of a sort, mostly brush I think. It will be defended, of course, and they may put their best rifles there, but it can be breached.'

At the conclusion of this tour, which took nearly an hour, Santa Anna told Cos: 'We will attack with great force from the north and knock a hole in that exposed wall with no houses behind it. But we will also attack with maximum clamor the palisade and hope to divert their forces.'

'The church?' an officer asked, referring to the roofless chapel. 'What of that, Excellency?'

'Attack it in force, but not seriously. Just enough to keep the defenders pinned down at a meaningless spot.'

Now the deployments were made: 'We'll attack from all sides at four o'clock Sunday morning. We should have the place by sunrise.' He wheeled his beautiful horse, turned back to take one last look at the Alamo, and said: 'Remember, no prisoners.'

From the church tower the red flag of death underscored that decision.

When the Macnabs arrived at Goliad toward dusk on Saturday, 20 February, they found affairs in much greater confusion than even Finlay had anticipated. He had assumed that Colonel Fannin, in response to Lieutenant Bonham's plea, would have his men preparing to make a dash into the Alamo; instead, he learned that the two other supreme commanders, Grant the malodorous Scotsman and Johnson the wild-eyed Illinois greengrocer, had marched off on their own in the fatuous belief that with only sixty-odd untrained volunteers they could capture the important Mexican port of Matamoros near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Even their own scouts reported that General Urrea, one of the ablest Mexican leaders, had assembled more than a thousand well-armed veterans there.

'What kind of madness is that?' Finlay asked after he and his son had been assigned places to sleep inside the presidio walls.

'It gets worse,' an embittered member of the Georgia Battalion groused. 'We should be on our way to the Alamo right now. But look at him.'

And for the first time Finlay Macnab, a man whose frontier experiences had converted a somewhat aimless character into one of surprising fortitude, witnessed at close quarters the confusion and lack of decisiveness which characterized Colonel Fannin. Thirty-two years old and disappointed because of his failure to graduate from West Point with a commission in the regular United States Army, he had become a slave trader for a while, then an eager drifter looking for something to turn up. He was an adventurer, inordinately ambitious, now in Texas looking for promotion to general, and reluctant to throw his forces into the Alamo, not because of cowardice or fear of death, but rather because if he were to do so, he would lose his command and be forced to serve under the despised amateur Colonel Travis.