The Furies (15 page)

Some of the men beyond the tree didn’t like that either. Houston’s lids flickered; he heard the angry whispers. But he didn’t turn to acknowledge them. Instead, he went on.

“You can join in the work to be done in Texas. We’ve got to rebuild. Get the government functioning—”

His hand strayed beneath one of the mussed blankets. He pulled out an ear of corn. Some of the kernels had been nibbled away.

“My afternoon meal.” He smiled. His thumb accidentally flicked three kernels from the ear. One of the men on the other side of the tree scrambled forward to snatch them up.

“I could take this corn home an’ plant it, General.”

Houston glanced at the ear in his hand, then suddenly began shucking kernels from it.

“Here—all of you take some. Plant it in your fields. It’s time to cultivate the arts of peace now that you’ve shown yourselves masters of the art of war.”

Pleased by his flattery, the men crowded forward. Amanda was momentarily forgotten as the Texans laughed and jostled one another, straining to get some of the corn Houston dropped from his outstretched hand.

“By God, we ought to call this Houston corn!” one of the men shouted.

The general shook his head. “Honor yourselves, not me. Call it San Jacinto corn.”

With his forefinger he worked another kernel loose, then tossed the ear into the crowd. Noisily, the Texans swarmed around the man who caught it. Not a one of them was paying any attention to Amanda now. She wondered whether the byplay with the corn had been a ploy to divert them and blunt their hostility.

Not entirely, she realized, as Houston held out his hand.

“You take this one. It’s time for all of us to start thinking about the future.”

Amanda tried to speak. She couldn’t. With bleak eyes, she stared at the kernel resting in her palm.

“Dr. Ewing,” Houston said, “I think you’d better conduct the señora back to the surgical tent. If any man so much as touches her, report it to me and I’ll have him whipped till he can’t walk.”

She leaned on Ewing’s arm in the twilight. Along the way, the kernel of corn dropped from her other hand. She was aware of the loss. But she didn’t turn back to search. She had no field to plow and plant. Nothing to give the future meaning and value. That she was safe and unhurt seemed of small importance. The fabric of her life had been ripped to ruin—again.

On a gray and showery afternoon in June, Amanda walked through the rubble in the lobby of Gura’s Hotel. With her was a small, fine-boned man in cleric’s robes, the parish priest, Don Refugio de la Garza.

Don Refugio wrinkled his nose at the smell of human waste left in a corner. Amanda surveyed the smashed counter, then a pile of scrapwood and horsehair—all that remained of the lobby furniture.

Her dress was the only touch of color in the whole dreary scene. It was homespun, dyed yellow with root dyes. A sunbonnet kept her face in shadow as she studied the wreckage. She had been back in Bexar for several weeks, escorted by an amiable soldier in a wagon Houston commandeered for her. The journey had been difficult. She felt weak most of the time, and was troubled frequently by nausea.

Shortly after she’d arrived, she’d been informed that Gura’s Hotel was no longer fit to be lived in. Don Refugio had advanced her a small sum to rent a room elsewhere in town. This was the first day she’d been able to summon the courage to visit Soledad Street and see the devastation for herself.

“It’s a pity, but there’s not much left,” Don Refugio said as Amanda gazed at the whitewashed wall. Someone had used charcoal to scrawl a filthy remark about Texans. “There was a good deal of drinking and carousing while Santa Anna’s senior officers were quartered here. Also, they were not particularly respectful of property belonging to an Anglo.”

Amanda sighed. “Is it the same upstairs?”

“Worse.”

“Then there’s not much point in going up. I suppose the land and the building will bring me a little money.”

The priest’s gray eyebrows shot up. “You don’t intend to reopen the hotel? I know it would require a great deal of work, but I thought—”

“I’m going to sell, Padre. As is. There’s bad feeling toward me in this town.”

“Yes, I realize. Still—”

“It’s even worse than before, when I had girls upstairs.”

“You can admit the ill will is understandable, can you not?”

“No. I was the one American woman who survived the battle at the mission
and
stood up to Santa Anna—in return for which, I was made a prisoner. To the Americans around here, that somehow makes me a traitor. Susannah Dickinson, on the other hand, took Santa Anna’s clemency—”

“She saw her husband die, Amanda! She was utterly demoralized—”

“I know. I’m not finding fault, just stating a fact. She
did
accept his offer—and spread the message he wanted her to spread. For that, she’s a heroine. I don’t imagine my name will ever appear on the list of the women who lived through the massacre. I’m confident hers will.”

“Ah, but a name on a paper tells nothing! If your name is recorded, you will probably be listed as a Mexican—”

“True. Anyway, that’s not the point. I wouldn’t accept Santa Anna’s so-called generosity—and look where it’s gotten me.”

“But people wonder why you didn’t run away from the Mexicans.”

“Because I gave my word to the officer who saved me from execution! Oh, what difference does it make? They hate me, and that’s that.”

“It will pass, Amanda.”

“Will it? I know what people are saying. That I should have refused to go with Cordoba. Broken my word. Fled. And if that wasn’t possible, I imagine they believe I should have done away with myself! Well—” Her mouth twisted. “I’ve always had a strong survival instinct. I gather that’s no longer permitted in Texas.”

“Nonsense,” Don Refugio snorted. “Do you know how many, here and elsewhere, actively supported Santa Anna when it seemed the Texan cause was lost? I assure you the number is not small.”

“People might even think differently if I’d lived with a different sort of man,” she went on, staring at three holes drilled in the wall by pistol balls. “But Major Cordoba was decent—and I’ve made no secret of that. Evidently decency on the part of the enemy is also unthinkable.”

“That we are all God’s creatures, with an equal distribution of devils and saints among all nations, is seldom remembered in wartime.”

“General Houston remembered,” she said. “He, at least, was kind to me.”

The priest nodded. “He has grown to be a man of immense wisdom, I think. They say there’ll be an election in the next few months. Burnet will step aside. Houston is almost certain to be named president of the republic. He’s your friend, and I’m sure he’d see that you were treated fairly. For that reason, you might want to reconsider your decision. I assure you the hatreds will be forgotten. We are all Texans now. We may eventually become Americans, if the rumors are true.”

“The rumors about annexation?”

“Yes. Houston is in favor, is he not?”

“Very much so. He told me before I came back that he may petition Congress—or at least ask the people to vote on whether a petition requesting annexation should be sent. But the newspapers say Jackson’s cooled on the idea. He doesn’t want a protracted war with Mexico, so he has to maintain neutrality. It’s all very muddled—especially since the Mexican legislature repudiated Santa Anna’s treaty recognizing the republic’s independence. Who knows how it will come out?”

Her words trailed off with an empty sound. The priest pondered, then agreed, “Yes, in some ways Santa Anna’s defeat only compounded the confusion. The matter of chattel slavery will becloud annexation, no doubt—”

Thinking of the dead in the mission, she made a derisive sound. “I trust you heard how Quincy Adams referred to the rebellion? Denounced it in Congress as nothing more than a scheme to restore slavery down here, and bring another slaveholding state into the nation? The fool!”

“There are some who would hope for that,” Don Refugio told her. “Here and in the United States.”

“Well, I won’t be present to see how the whole thing’s resolved, Padre. I’ve made up my mind. I have to start over somewhere else. With a new name. Or an old one, rather. The name I had before I was married. I need a fresh start at everything.”

The little priest tried to read her face in the shadow cast by the bonnet’s brim. He couldn’t. But he heard the strain in her voice.

“Whether I’ve done right or wrong is something someone else will have to decide. Maybe the woman who guards the vine—”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Amanda, I beg you to think carefully before—”

“I can’t stay in Bexar any longer, Padre. There are—too many memories. My husband—my friends murdered in the chapel. The major—”

Her voice broke. She shook her head as if angry with herself. Don Refugio laid his slim fingers on her arm, squeezing gently to comfort her.

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. Further west, I suppose. I can travel with one of the pack trains. Perhaps to Santa Fe. Even on to California—I hear that’s beautiful country.”

“Comfortable, certainly. But you would be a subject of Mexico again.”

“I’m not trying to escape a government, just the past. Besides, more and more Americans are settling there all the time. Coming up from Santa Fe, or from the east by ship—”

“And across the mountains one day, perhaps.”

“The mountains? I doubt that.”

“So did I, at first. But a number of the itinerant traders claim the fur companies have sent wagon shipments quite far west to equip their brigades. They believe it’s possible to traverse the mountains and reach the Pacific with a wheeled vehicle.” He looked amused. “America has a ravening hunger for land. Few obstacles will deter its satisfaction, least of all mountains. I expect your people won’t be content until they claim the continent from coast to coast. So I’d have a care about choosing California. You might find yourself embroiled in the same political turmoil you’ve just endured here.”

“There’s always the Oregon Territory.”

“One more area ripe for dispute and rebellion! Don’t the British and the United States occupy it jointly, by treaty—?”

“It doesn’t make any difference where I go—so long as it’s away from here!”

After a moment, Don Refugio sighed in a resigned way. “If your mind is made up, I am at your disposal to help with arrangements.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, but without much feeling. “I won’t be going immediately, much as I’d like to. I won’t be in any condition to travel for a while. You see, I—”

She experienced a bursting sense of relief at finally admitting it to someone. “I’m fairly certain I’m going to have a child.”

“Push,” the fat old midwife said with a singular lack of compassion. She rested hard hands on Amanda’s huge, heaving belly.

She tried. The pain was intense, and growing worse. The contractions seemed to torment her whole being.

She lay on a table in a room Don Refugio had provided in a wing of the San Fernando church. Her knees were bent, her feet braced against blocks of wood the priest had nailed to one end of the table. Don Refugio, dimly visible at the edge of a circle of lantern light, was in attendance because he’d acquired certain medical skills over the years. But Serafina, the midwife brought in from the country, was in charge.

There was a howling in Amanda’s ears. Was it the wind outside the church, carrying sleet and rain from the northwest this gloomy day in January 1837? Or was it only an imaginary echo of sounds from the past? The melody of the
deguello?
The shrieks of the dying in the mission? The pitiful cries of the routed soldiers at San Jacinto—?

“Push, for the Virgin’s sake!” Serafina cried. “I can see the head!”

The insides of Amanda’s thighs were wet. She lay naked, only her breasts covered by a scrap of rag. Her hands gripped the ends of a length of pine wood the midwife had given her to bite.

She dug her teeth into the soft, fragrant stick and closed her eyes, writhing.

“Hold her still!” Serafina exclaimed. Don Refugio’s hands pinned Amanda’s shoulders. The contractions were no longer distinct; they blended into a single consuming pain. She felt the thick thrust of something being expelled from within her body—

“Push, woman.
Push.
”

She lost her sense of time and of place, catching only fleeting visual and aural impressions as her mind blanked out, then reawoke—

The thickness between her legs was gone. She saw Don Refugio, white rags draped over one arm of his robe. She heard water splash as Serafina bathed her red-stippled hands and forearms.

She heard a muted gurgling, too, then the midwife’s grumbles as she manipulated twine, tying the cord once near the opening from which the child had emerged and a second time close to the belly of the unseen baby. The child must be resting on the mound of rags between her thighs, Amanda realized—

The midwife stepped back.

“Cut the cord, Padre.”

The sudden glitter of a bowie knife almost made her scream aloud. Then she remembered she wasn’t in the mission, nor on the hill of San Jacinto, but in an adobe room with a winter rainstorm raging outside.

Don Refugio’s hands dipped out of sight. Immediately after cleaving the cord, he whipped the rags off his arm and began to bundle the infant. Amanda glimpsed a tiny, plum-colored face puckered in a struggle for breath. The baby’s skin was wet and shimmering—

“A very good child,” Serafina announced. “Now we must wait.”

A second later, Don Refugio said, “I don’t believe she hears you.”

“The Pope send me packing, but it’s a mystery to me how you celibates can presume to minister to women. Nothing personal, mind you—” A shrug. “You’re a lot better than some I know.” A pointing finger loomed before Amanda’s eyes. “She hears me. She just doesn’t feel like chattering.”

“A thousand pardons!” Don Refugio said. “I forget this is your domain, not mine.”

Amanda’s grimace gentled into a smile. She stopped biting the stick so hard, released her hands from the ends. The priest melted into the darkness as the baby began to squall. In the church tower, the wind struck wild clangs from the bells.