Purgatory's Shore Read online

  Lewis shook his head. “I saw little glory in Mexico and I’m certainly no ‘hero.’ I might congratulate myself for my survival, but not any extraordinary deeds.”

  “No more than anyone else who was there, is that it, Lewis?” came a growling voice on the other side of the dragoon lieutenant, who was startled to see the tall Ranger there.

  “That’s Captain Giles Anson of the Texas Mounted Volunteers, also known as ‘Rangers’—among other things. Lieutenant Coryon Burton,” Lewis announced by way of introduction.

  “At your service, sir!” Burton exclaimed.

  Anson smiled and nodded, but looked intently back at Lewis. “Palo Alto an’ Resaca de la Palma were ‘glorious’ for us, I suppose.” He glanced back at Burton. “Maybe even miraculous, considering how inexperienced an’ outnumbered we were, an’ only Ringgold’s an’ Duncan’s artillery seemed to know what they were doin’. That miracle cost us Ringgold an’ some other fine fellas, but bought us a lightly contested advance—aside from skirmishin’, sickness, an’ accidents,” he inserted darkly, “all the way from Matamoros to Monterrey. Things were . . . different there, an’ everyone was called to be a hero in that fight.” He smiled oddly at Lewis. “Captain Cayce too.”

  Lewis looked back out to sea. Isidra was steaming easily enough, and even Commissary appeared to ride comfortably, but Xenophon was wallowing and bashing her way along just as roughly as Mary Riggs.

  Much of the Battle of Monterrey had been fought in the city, house to house, rooftop to rooftop, even through the walls. Lewis had never seen anything like it. Never imagined something so brutal and desperate. His main contribution, after initially being attached to Duncan’s Battery of the 2nd US to support an assault on Fort Libertad atop “Independence Hill”—in which Anson also participated—was to push a section of guns right down the rubbled, corpse-strewn streets of the city.

  “He was wounded there, you know,” Anson told Burton as if in confidence. “Me too, which is why we missed the more recent ‘glorious’ festivities at Buena Vista, or the Siege of Vera Cruz. Otherwise, we’d’ve been involved in one or the other.” He chuckled. “The ‘one’ for me, most likely, an’ ‘the other’ for Captain Cayce. General Taylor likes Texans better than General Scott, though ‘Old Fuss an’ Feathers’ is startin’ to learn he needs us after all. That’s fine,” he continued. “We need him too. Taylor’s had most of his army taken away, an’ there’ll be much more fightin’ on the road from Vera Cruz to the halls of the Montezuma.”

  With that, he nodded a bow and strode down the leaning, bounding deck and squeezed through the miserable soldiers sitting on it, surrounding four other men dressed much like he was near the base of the main mast. Lewis didn’t know their names but had seen them all before. One was as massive and hairy as a bear, with a voice rather like one as well. Another was clearly Mexican himself, with a huge mustache and bristly black side whiskers. The last was a tall, slim youth, also apparently of Mexican descent, but with no facial hair and almost delicate features. He was always with Anson and served as his aide. There was even a slight resemblance. Lewis knew most of Anson’s family, including his wife, were murdered by marauding Mexican soldiers during Texas’s war for independence. Anson was with Sam Houston’s army at the time. Lewis had no close family and could only imagine how devastated the Ranger must’ve been. It certainly helped explain his implacable attitude toward the enemy. At least to a degree. Lewis suspected the boy was a surviving son or nephew.

  “A hard man,” he murmured, watching Anson go. “But valuable in a fight.” He cleared his throat and tried to smile at Burton. “And though not the only man aboard ‘excited’ to go to war, perhaps the only one anxious to return to it.” His brow furrowed. “I don’t mean he’s looking forward to it; there’s a distinction. . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “Of some sort. I can’t really explain it. Captain Anson isn’t a cruel man, but he’s performed cruel deeds on occasion.” He cleared his throat and bestowed his first genuine smile on Burton. “He’s a Texan, after all. They have a more bitter history with Mexico—and President Santa Anna—than the rest of us. Don’t let it bother you,” he advised. “You’ll likely never see him again after we disembark at Vera Cruz.”

  Coryon Burton’s boldness—and Anson’s departure—seemed to have encouraged others. Two more young men approached, both dressed like Burton, but looking a little ill under the slightly fuller side whiskers they’d accomplished. The first was presented as Second Lieutenant Justinian Olayne, R Company, 1st Artillery, and the second was Second Lieutenant Clifford Swain of the Mounted Rifles. Lewis was surprised to see the embroidered silver eagle on his stiffly stuffed wheel hat with an R on the shield.

  “Are there many riflemen aboard, Lieutenant Swain?” Lewis asked. The Rifles were virtually indistinguishable from dragoons in dress, except for dark blue trousers with black seam stripes. Lewis hadn’t noticed them, and with virtually everyone abovedeck sitting now . . .

  “Not many, sir. Most are in Isidra with the regular infantry—which is how we’ll serve, I understand,” he replied morosely. “There’s a painful shortage of American horses in Mexico, and since the Rifles already there lost most of theirs to a storm at sea, we’ll all be afoot when we get there.”

  “And how many men are here?” Lewis pressed.

  Swain gulped embarrassment. “Just twenty, sir, and only me for an officer. The spillovers from Isidra.”

  “Very well.” Lewis looked at Olayne. “You have two companies of foot artillery and only one officer?”

  “I do,” Olayne replied with a faint Irish accent. “But there’s three officers, sir, counting yourself.”

  Lewis smiled. “Indeed. And the other?”

  Olayne shook his head. “Down with the seasickness as bad as any aboard. I fear he’d drown himself if he had the strength to creep up on deck.”

  Lewis forced himself not to laugh. It really wasn’t funny. He tilted his head toward the setting sun. “Well, perhaps he’ll survive another three days or so. We’ve made our turn west. Captain Holland tells me we should anchor off Vera Cruz by then. Personally, I suspect it’ll be the morning of the fourth day. Holland strikes me as the careful sort, uninclined to approach strange shores after dark, but . . .” He paused and pointed. “Look to the south, past the other ships. You can just barely see it when we crest the waves.”

  The three young men waited, straining their eyes, and were finally rewarded with a view of a distant, hazy shoreline. “Is that Mexico?” Coryon Burton asked, slightly hushed.

  Lewis had to remind himself that, officers or not, his companions were still basically just boys. Any land beyond their limited travels, particularly that of an enemy, would be strange and exotic. “Yes, in a sense, though that’s what they call the Yucatán, and it’s an independent republic.”

  “Whose side are they on?” Burton asked.

  “An interesting question,” Lewis hedged. “Before joining the Union—and the current war began—Texas used its little navy to help Yucatán break from Mexico, and the two republics were allies. But the indigenous Maya, with the assistance of the British—after the British helped Mexico against Yucatán and Texas—have rebelled, and Yucatán has requested Mexican aid to subdue the uprising.” He shook his head. “The British do love to stir the pot.”

  “As does Mr. Polk,” Justinian Olayne agreed. Lewis frowned. He never discussed domestic politics and didn’t think professional officers should, whether they agreed with them or not. Olayne caught his look. “I only meant that it seems all political leaders appear to enjoy baiting the bear of war, only to scurry behind the soldier when the bear decides to bite.”

  Lewis still frowned but couldn’t really argue with that. “In any event,” he said, “I don’t know whether we’d be welcome there or not.”

  “I’ve seen Yucatán on a map!” Lieutenant Swain exclaimed excitedly, loosening the slight tension. “It p
okes up into the Gulf, like Florida pokes downward!”

  Lewis smiled, suddenly enjoying himself. He’d forgotten how much he’d missed simple, casual conversation. “Very much like that.” He tilted his head to the west again, only this time glancing that way as well. He was startled to see that, while the sky around the blurry sunset remained a milky, yellow gray, a stark, brooding darkness was growing in the south-southwest. There was also a distant sail. “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’ll be back.” He smirked. “Save my place by the rail, if you please.” Turning aft, he threaded his way between and around the uncomfortable forms cluttering the deck. Most wore everything they owned in the world: bulging knapsacks and blankets, coats rolled up inside, as well as their buff-strapped cartridge boxes and weapons, of course. Lewis noted the salt air was starting to redden their bright musket barrels. No one looked up as he passed, and he didn’t blame them. If they did, they’d have to “notice” him and stand and salute. Lewis pressed on, mindful of the occasional slick streak of vomit.

  The state of the deck reflected no disgrace on Captain Eric Holland and his ship, or even the NCOs responsible for detailing parties to deal with the mess. Vomit was an endless, constant occurrence, impossible to stop and just as hopeless to keep up with. Lewis finally joined Mary Riggs’s thin, rather rough-looking commander standing by the helmsman at the wheel. Unlike most, Holland was clean-shaven and wore his hair long and unbound. The elements had made him look close to eighty, though as spry as he was, he couldn’t possibly be that old.

  “Aye,” he said, noting Lewis’s arrival with something like approval. “I expected to see you soon enough.” He nodded out at the crowd of soldiers. “You’re the only one of that misbegotten lot aware of events around him.”

  Lewis considered that unfair and inaccurate. He hadn’t been aware of much at all, shortly before. “There seems to be rough weather ahead,” he said. “And an unknown sail.”

  Captain Holland nodded. “Aye. The lookouts’ve been cautioned against shoutin’ things out”—he grinned—“that might upset the passengers. God knows most’re unhappy enough already.” He gestured forward. “As to the first, I don’t expect a storm. The glass is actually risin’ ”—he pressed his forehead—“an’ I feel it in my head. There’s a southeasterly wind, sure—which is rarely a pleasant thing—but it serves our purpose an’ should push those ill-lookin’ clouds to the north an’ away.” He squinted. If anything, the dark smudge on the horizon had grown. “I’d generally think so at any rate, but the weather obeys no command, an’ damn few of the rules it makes for itself. All we can do is take our best guess,” he added with a little less certainty. “As for the sail?” He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, though with the navy so active I doubt it’s hostile. There’s little we can do if it is. Only Isidra’s armed; a dozen twelve pounders if I’m not mistaken, an’ those only carronades.” No one would be fooled by the gunports painted on the sides of the old whalers. “She’d be better off usin’ her engine to run,” Holland continued, then chuckled darkly. “As for Mary Riggs, Xenophon, an’ Commissary . . . we might see the foe off with a broadside of puke.”

  A sailor slid down a backstay from the maintop as nimble as an ape and hopped around the men to join them. He was barefoot, and Lewis sympathized with the extra care he took. “She’s British, Cap’n,” the man confided lowly. Holland relaxed, but his craggy brows knitted in anger. “We’re safe from her, at least—though if it were up to me, we’d be fightin’ England again instead of Mexico!” He cocked an eye at Lewis. “We nearly were, over Oregon, an’ like as not you’d prefer that as well. As for me . . . I was a bosun’s mate in USS Essex at Valparaiso, with Porter, God bless ’im. March twenty-eighth, thirty-two years past, last month. That was a foul, bloody day. God damn the British,” he seethed before glancing at the distant Isidra. “An’ goddamn carronades!”

  Lewis touched the downward-pointing, almost useless brim of his 1839 pattern “wheel” hat. Infantry liked the round-topped, vaguely mushroom-shaped hats since they could rotate the flat brims around to the left to protect their faces from the vent jets of muskets beside them in line, but otherwise they wouldn’t even keep the sun out of your eyes—not even off your nose. Lewis’s nose had remained red and peeling ever since the hats were adopted. “Thank you for your courtesy, Captain Holland. I’ll take my leave.”

  Holland nodded. “Aye. We may be as different as fish from fowl, but I know a man who takes pride in his work—whether he likes it or not. Such men deserve my respect.” He frowned, staring forward past Lewis, whom he’d essentially now dismissed from his mind. “Damned if that wicked line of clouds ain’t growin’,” he told the helmsman. “We’ll have to shorten sail before dark.”

  Lewis left Captain Holland to run his ship and rejoined the lieutenants by the rail. The distant sail became a ship—clearly now flying the Union Jack—tacking south across their path. Lewis wasn’t a sailor, but knew the British captain would soon slant back to the north. He wouldn’t want to be much closer to shore, especially as the haze-filtered sun vanished on the horizon and the darkening sky turned ever more menacing. Dull ripples of lightning pulsed in the clouds. Signal flags flashed up the halyards on Isidra, likely the last they’d see that night, instructing all ships to maintain their heading but shorten sail. Sailors scampered up the shrouds to reef the canvas as Holland directed, voice surprisingly loud even without a speaking trumpet. Some of the soldiers on deck looked around with interest, watching the activity. Most merely sat, made insensible by misery.

  “A hell of a way to go to war,” Lewis sympathized.

  “I agree wholeheartedly with that!” said Olayne, gulping and looking little better than the men as he waved at the sea beyond the rail. “You don’t suppose it can get worse than this, do you?”

  Lewis finally laughed. He couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry to tell you, but it certainly can. Much worse. This isn’t bad at all, now.”

  “My God.”

  They watched the strange ship for a while, making its oblique approach, commenting on its features. It was a tall three-master, black hulled with a broad yellow stripe down its side, much faster and more weatherly than Mary Riggs. There was no commissioning pennant, and Lewis suspected she’d been a frigate, sold out of service, now in her declining years as well. Sails flashed and turned as she heaved over and took the wind on her starboard beam, coming up and across ahead of them. Signal flags broke out in her mizzen top, streaming dull in the failing light, but Captain Holland saw them and cursed loud enough for all to hear. “She’s ‘carryin’ dispatches’—nice way to say ‘To hell with you. We won’t stop to speak.’ I’ll warrant she’s really takin’ European diplomats and moneymen, along with their squallin’ broods, away from the war an’ fever that comes to Vera Cruz in spring.” Derisive laughter met that opinion, though Lewis didn’t think that was funny either. Fever was no joke, and the army he’d been with in Northern Mexico had lost more men to disease than Mexican steel and lead. “Oh, isn’t that lovely!” Holland ranted even louder at an additional hoist. “They all wish us joy on our adventure in Mexico!”

  Sailors, even some soldiers, braved the blowing spray and gathered in the bow to jeer as the British ship swept by in their path, hardly a cable away, but the wind was freshening and they’d never be heard.

  “At least the men seem keen enough to take offense,” Burton observed.

  “Those who can move,” Lewis agreed, his estimation of Holland rising. Unlike most, he knew the second signal merely warned of the weather and wished them good luck. But few things brought people together, Americans and foreigners alike, better than a jab at the British. Holland had seized the opportunity to take the men’s minds off their wretchedness and fear, and Lewis only wished he’d thought of something similar himself. It dawned on him then that he’d probably failed the men in other ways. What difference did it make that the junior officers hadn’t come to him sooner? Regardless of
protocol, he should’ve gone to them and taken charge, forced them to organize diversions for their men, even if they’d only been make-work details. But just as the men had largely been in their own desolate, uncomfortable little worlds, so had he.

  As Captain Anson said, Lewis had been wounded at Monterrey: a musket ball in his lower chest. Only distance, inferior Mexican gunpowder, or divine providence stopped the ball from passing through the ribs it broke and cracking his liver open. So sure it had and he would die, Lewis took mad chances, exposing himself stupidly until the end of the battle—and he discovered the wound wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. That had been part of the source of his “heroism,” as he prayed for another ball to give him a quick, clean death so he could avoid the lingering suffering he’d watched Major Ringgold endure. And in any event, he had to withstand it anyway. Relatively minor as it was, the wound turned septic due to all the filthy uniform fragments the ball carried under the skin, and Lewis nearly died. His chest still hurt, and the wound remained partially open, disgorging pus and rotten fibers of wool or cotton in addition to slivers of bone and tiny flakes of lead. Sometimes he wondered if it would ever heal—and if his mind had been damaged as badly.

  In spite of the pain and certainty he’d die, he’d become the battle to a shocking degree, like the lightning in a storm, even loving it in some strange way as if only then and there had he achieved his destiny, no matter how brief it may be. He hadn’t become a berserker, mindlessly flailing about; if anything, he turned colder, more thoughtful, but instantly decisive and infinitely more lethal as he saw things more clearly than he ever had, directing his bleeding section of guns relentlessly forward, even replacing a fallen gunner and aiming one of the weapons himself, almost gleefully blasting down adobe walls and annihilating clots of troops that tried to assemble in his path. Soon, he had only enough bloody, exhausted men to crew a single gun, but he wouldn’t have stopped even then. Less than two blocks from the Central Plaza, a messenger—Captain Anson, in fact—grabbed him from behind, dodged his weak saber slash, and angrily told him there was a truce. To this day, Lewis wasn’t sure what he would’ve done if he hadn’t collapsed from loss of blood. Would he have kept pressing on? Would he have slashed at the Ranger again? He honestly didn’t know, and that even more than his fear of suffering had left him oddly ashamed and hesitant to go to battle again. Not out of fear of Mexican musket balls, but because of how much he liked it. Afraid he might prove himself as much a monster as he sometimes thought Captain Anson was. It had made him withdraw, kept him from asserting the leadership he should have over these unknowing, unsuspecting boys.