Soul Catcher (19 page)

"Yeah."

"Me, too."

Cain looked back over at him. "That where you lose it?" he asked, touching his own arm.

"What, this?" the man said, wiggling his empty coat sleeve like a magic trick. "Hell, no. Lost this damn thing over at the mill. I was three sheets to the wind and got'er caught in a roller. When I come to, this is the way I found myself. Hell of a thing. Where'd you see action?"

"Resaca de la Palma. Monterrey. Buena Vista. You?"

"Was with old man Scott when he took Mexico City. Hotter'n a whore's twat, that place, and twice as stinkin'," he said with a laugh. "Them senoritas was something, though. What regiment you with?"

"I got there late and they put me in the Second Indiana. Under General Lane. Fought with Captain O'Brien and later Colonel Jeff Davis's Mississippi Rifles at Buena Vista."

"I heard that was something," the man said, making an empty whistling sound.

Cain shrugged. "We lost some good men."

"That where you pick up the limp? I noticed it when you come in."

"Yeah."

"Well, here's to a couple of dumb sons-a-bitches," the man said, holding up his glass. "What business I ever had going off and fighting in that damn place, I'll never know. Wasn't none of my affair."

"Mine neither," replied Cain.

That seemed enough of an invitation for the man to take his drink and move down and pull up a seat. As it turned out, he wasn't a bad sort, and he got better with the drinking. They talked and drank and ate pickled eggs, and then talked and drank some more, each of them buying the other drinks, though at some point it was Cain doing all the buying with the other fellow saying he was a little short. They lost track of the time as they reminisced about battles and commanders, the heat and dust and swamps, the mosquitoes and flies and bad water, the fevers and dysentery. The ineptness of most of the Mexican generals and some of the American ones, too. The superiority of the U.S. weaponry, including the gun that Cain now carried on his waist (he even took it out of the holster to let the man hold it, wield it about until the heavyset barkeep threatened to kick them out unless he put the thing away). They both agreed on the sheer doggedness of the Mexican soldier, how he'd keep attacking under that crazy and

ruthless Santa Anna no matter how many of them fell.

"They died by the hundreds," the man said. "After we kicked ole Santa Anna's ass, we shoulda took that fellow out and shot the bastard, the way he led those poor devils to slaughter."

"You're right there, fellow," Cain agreed.

"Joshua Strong," he said, extending his hand.

"Cain."

"Where you from, Cain?"

"Virginia."

"You're a long ways from home. What brings you way up this way?"

"Business" was all Cain said, and the man didn't push.

It was late when Cain staggered out to his horse. A gaudy silver moon hung over the street like a great eyeball, white and ragged, staring down at him, with little gray veins etching its surface. He was so slewed he didn't even remember which way north was, and as he unbuttoned his fly to piss there in the street, he hoped to hell Hermes would remember and just take him where he needed to go, as he had many times in the past. The horse nudged him, looking for his piece of sugar. It took Cain two tries to get his foot in the stirrup and mount the horse. "Take me home, boy," he said to Hermes when he was finally in the saddle. As he rode along in the moonlit night, he started to sing the lyrics to "Barbara Allen":

.

Twas in the merry month of May

When Flowers were a-bloomiri

Sweet Willie on his deathbed lay

For the love of Barbara Allen.

.

Into his disordered thoughts, winging itself wildly like an evening bat, came the memory of Buena Vista and the men who died there. And the young Indian girl who'd saved his life.

Chapter 7.

Cain had gone to war for the same hackneyed, mule-stupid reasons that young men had been going and dying ever since the Trojan War--out of vanity or arrogance, out of a sense of adventure, or out of the mistaken belief that glory was not only attainable but a thing to be sought and cherished, to be won at all costs, even if it meant dying like Bowie and Travis and Crockett. He went, as others had before him, to escape a life he felt trapped in, to leave it before the jailer forever locked his cell and threw away the key. And most important, Cain went out of fear--the fear of what would happen to him if he didn't go, of what his life would look like if he were foolish enough to be left behind. He thought war was a way of getting out of Nottoway Chase and not having to marry Alexandra Throgmorton. He felt that going off to war would be a way of, if not actually avoiding, at least delaying, settling into a life of ledger books and feed costs and tobacco prices, a life of watching the skies for rain and seeing the years drain, year by miserable year, into the red Virginia soil. The war, he felt, might even change his perspective. He told himself that, upon his return (it didn't occur to him that some men going to war didn't return), he might even settle down and want to marry Lexi. The distance and time, he'd convinced himself, might actually make his heart grow fonder of her; the purifying light of war might return him with a fuller appreciation for the peace and quiet of agrarian life.

So he'd taken the horse and the money, packed a few clothes and some of Lila's biscuits and a slab of bacon, and left in the middle of the night, exactly three days before he was to have been married. He left a note on his father's desk, one that put the shiniest gloss on his motivations:

.

Dearest Father,

Have gone off to do my duty for country and for the great state of Virginia. I hope to make you proud. Give my heart-felt apologies to Lexi. Tell her I shall return, at which time, if she will still have me, we may then be joined in matrimony.

With affection I remain,

Your son,

Augustus

.

Like many young men, Cain rode off to Texas to fight against Mexico with hardly a notion of what the war was about, except that the Mexicans had, a decade earlier, slaughtered the valiant men of the Alamo, and that now they were once again trying to make war on the state, this time a part of these United States. So he headed off to sign up with old Zack Taylor. On the road heading away from Nottoway Chase, he'd had a heady sense of freedom and adventure and limitless possibilities, feelings he'd never had before. As he fell in with other young men riding south, talking around the campfires and sleeping under the stars, a notion was kindled in him that he was now embarked on a grand and sacred mission, one whose particulars he couldn't quite fathom but whose general outline he never doubted for a moment. No longer would he be sucking dirt behind a plow or smelling the shit-encrusted rumps of cattle that he drove toward a stock pen. Cain pictured himself a sort of modern-day Achilles, off to Troy to do glorious battle.

"Where you from, Cain?" a bucktoothed boy from Tennessee asked him one night as he passed around a jug of homemade white lightning.

"Virginia," he replied. "Y'ever kill nobody?"

Cain shook his head. "You?"

"Hell, yeah. This y'here feller come at me with a knife. I give 'im a barrel of number eight shot right 'twixt the eyes. Pshaw. He was dead 'fore he hit the ground. But you get used to it. After the first one it ain't so bad." The boy, seventeen or so, didn't even have fuzz on his cheek to shave. Yet he acted as if he was an old hand at killing, as if he and death were old friends.

"We're gone learn them Mexican niggers who they're afoolin with," the boy said. Later, in the bloody street fighting at Monterrey, Cain would see the boy take a bullet in the gut, and die calling out for his mama.

And as with most young men, for Cain, the reality of war quickly extinguished any notion of glory or truth or moral certitude that he had harbored when he enlisted. Since he was good with horses, they made him a driver of a wagon that brought the wounded from the battlefield to the hospital. The abstractions quickly fell away before the sight of men hit by grapeshot and cannonballs, the screams and curses of the wounded, the stench of rotting flesh, the fear that caused men to soil their pants. He witnessed the brutality of war close-up. He helped the doctors hold men down while they sawed off their limbs and picked out pieces of shrapnel. He listened to the final words of men about to die. Sometimes he had to pick up a rifle and fight alongside the other soldiers. He grew to understand the secret knowledge of killing, to know how easy a thing it was, how dirt cheap a human life was. He also saw the atrocities that were committed on both sides. He saw the scorn the Americans heaped on the "half a nigger" Mexicans, as they were called, and their peculiar religion. There was the Massacre of the Cave near Agua Nueva, where, in an act of supposed retribution for the killing of captured Americans, Arkansas volunteers rounded up some thirty Mexican civilians and slaughtered them, then proceeded to scalp them and place the bloody scalps on the altar of a Catholic chapel. There was the harsh treatment of the Irish in the ranks, who were ridiculed for their accent and their Catholic religion, so much so that one group finally defected to the Mexican side and became known as the San Patricios brigade--after St. Patrick--only to be hanged after the war as traitors.

He came to realize that the life of a soldier was mostly filled not with glory and adventure, but with boredom and routine, with tedium and repetition, with pointless tasks and grinding monotony all aimed, it seemed, at whittling a fellow down to an unthinking draft animal who simply plodded onward until told to do something else. It was an existence worse even than that he'd experienced back on his father's farm. Still, Cain proved himself a good soldier. He marched when he was ordered, slept and ate when he was told, didn't complain much, and, when commanded, he fought and fought well. He drove his wagon fearlessly through musket and cannon fire, sometimes right into the thick of battle to pick up the wounded. In fact, for his actions at the battle of Resaca de la Palma, he received a special commendation for bravery. If he no longer understood the cause for which he fought, at least he admired the men with whom he fought. That, he learned, was the real reason men continued to fight and give their lives in war. When he put his life in danger, it wasn't for some abstract notion like glory or country or freedom, or even nobility of cause; it was simply because of his comrades who died fighting beside him, their blood draining away onto the sands of some stinking desert. If he died, it would be in helping them, defending them. Around the campfire at night sometimes, a man would get out a fiddle and play something, about war or home or some lost love. The other men would be smoking pipes or writing letters to sweethearts, and he would sit there looking up into the desert sky, at the stars, so cold and remote, and yet so perfectly clear and purposeful. It almost made him want to believe in a god; at least it made him believe he had a reason for his life now. He had no one to write to, at least no one he wanted to write to. But he didn't feel alone. He told himself his family, his life, were here, among his comrades, and like all soldiers he had to convince himself of this truth. Otherwise he couldn't fight.

Then came Buena Vista, where Santa Anna had amassed an army of twenty thousand to attack the much smaller American force defending a hacienda in a mountain valley just outside the town of Saltillo. The riflemen of the Second Indiana were stationed on the left flank along the side of a ridge below a steep mountain range. It was here that Santa Anna threw the bulk of his force, hoping to outflank and overrun the American position. The fighting was fierce, with the Mexicans laying down a murderous crossfire of canister and grape and musket fire. The Second Indiana held their ground for a long while but finally were overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the enemy. While most of the line retreated, running wildly down the ridge toward the American rear, Captain O'Brien's and Captain Washington's artillery companies remained behind and fought. Cain had been there to help gather up the wounded.

As the Mexicans began to breach their lines, he grabbed a rifle and returned fire. He picked off the advancing Mexican lancers in their bright blue uniforms, hitting them as easily as shooting bottles on a fence post. It was so easy, in fact, so much death for the taking, it almost made him sick to his stomach. Still, he continued killing, and, as if by some unspoken agreement, the brave, stupid Mexicans continued dying. They kept advancing, getting closer and closer. Finally, he had to pull his Colt revolver and fire at point-blank range. They were close enough now that he could see the color of the eyes of the men he shot, looked right into them, saw that one was missing a tooth, another had a scar on his cheek. One man got so close that Cain could see the hint of a smile on his face, as if he thought the whole thing a bloody joke somehow. Damn fool, Cain thought before he shot him in the face. The man fell down at Cain's feet.