Country of the Bad Wolfes (8 page)

Samuel Thomas was among those who received their punishment in front of
hundreds of witnessing American soldiers in the main plaza of San Angel, a village on the outskirt of the capital. In the center of the plaza stood a newly erected gallows consisting of a single long crossbeam from which dangled sixteen noosed ropes—the others of the condemned would be executed over the next three days. Set in a row under the crossbeam were eight small mule-drawn carts, and in each one stood a pair of San Patricios with their hands bound behind them. The carts faced a line of trees along one side of the plaza where the men to be flogged were stripped bare to the waist and each one tied to a tree trunk. The officer in charge kept loud count as the whippings were laid on. Samuel Thomas locked his jaws to keep from crying out but he passed out on the thirty-ninth lash. After the fiftieth, he was revived with a pail of water so he would be conscious for his branding. Two men held his head fast while another applied the glowing iron directly below his eye and he smelled his own searing flesh and bone and screamed in violation of his vow that he would not. It went even worse for Riley, who was the most hated of the deserters for being their leader. His brand was applied upside down, purportedly by accident, and so, to the loud approval of the spectating troops, the officer in charge ordered that it be burned correctly into his other cheek. Riley had managed to hold silent the first time but could not stifle himself the second, and his screams roused a great and happy chorus of derision.

Then the hangings. White hoods were drawn over the heads of the condemned and the nooses snugged round their necks. At an officer's signal, the muleteers' whips cracked and the carts rumbled out from under the crossbeam and the plaza rang with cheers. A fortunate few of the gibbeted died instantly of snapped necks but most of them, including Lucas Malone, strangled to death, choking with awful sounds as their hysterical feet sought purchase on the empty air and their trousers darkened with piss and shit. The flogged and branded were then made to dig the hanged men's graves and bury them, Samuel Thomas scooping at the earth with a trowel in his one good hand.

With the fall of Mexico City, the war was over in every sense but officially. It was another five months before the signing in early 1848 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which compact Mexico ceded to the United States an enormous portion of land that extended the American border to the Pacific coast. But it was still another month before the treaty was accepted by the American Senate, and then another two and a half months before it was ratified by Mexico. And all that while, the captive Saint Patricks labored daily with picks and shovels in a garbage pit a quarter-mile wide at the edge of the city, a monstrous crater writhing with rats and swarming with flies and aflutter with great flocks of carrion birds. Into this pit were emptied daily wagonloads of every sort of refuse and organic rot, including carcasses of animals large and small, the discard of miscarriages and abortions. The fetor made
their eyes water and stung their throats even through the bandanas they wore over nose and mouth, and every man of them had bloodshot eyes and a chronic cough.

They were at first incarcerated in the Acordada Penitentiary, near the center of the capital, and every morning before going to the pit they unloaded dead bodies from the municipal wagons that each dawn collected them off the streets and alleyways, as many of them victims of murder as of exposure and malnutrition and alcohol poisoning and disease and total exhaustion of the will to live. These dead were displayed on the prison's front steps all day and night for anyone to claim. Those still there the next morning were then removed to make room for the new day's corpses and were taken for burial in the potter's field adjoining the garbage pit.

After two of the Patricios escaped from the city penitentiary—both breakouts abetted by visitors—the prisoners were moved to the nearby fortress of Chapultepec castle and visiting privileges were curtailed. One of the escapees had been a diminutive man named Duhan, who dressed himself in smuggled women's clothing and then simply walked out with the female visitors when they departed. The other to escape was John Little, who had spoken hardly at all since their capture at Churubusco. His liberation also entailed a disguise sneaked in to him by a woman visitor, a rich Mexican sympathetic to the Patricios, though none of them had any notion of why she had specifically chosen John Little to help escape. His disguise was designed to let him walk out in place of a servant who had accompanied her, but the guards became aware of the ruse just as the party was exiting the prison and was within sight of the carriage waiting at the curb. A gunfight ensued and the woman's two employees were killed and the woman herself arrested. But John Little made away, and none of his comrades would ever know what became of him.

On a day in late spring, less than two weeks before the last American troops withdrew from Mexico, the Saint Patricks were mustered into the central courtyard and there shorn of their hair, every man of them razored to the scalp, blood lacing down their heads, and then made to march in single file around the yard to a drum-and-fife rendition of “The Rogue's March” while they were vilified and spat upon by the troops. And were finally directed out the front gate and set free. Jack Riley and a few other stalwarts would return to the Mexican army, but the others had had enough of the soldier's life, and after sharing a common cell for nine months most of them had had enough of each other. As soon as they were into the park and out of view of the American soldiers they began drifting apart in different directions without words of farewell nor mentions of destination, and few of them would meet again. As for the promise of land grants, it had been made by a government anticipating victory over the Yankees and since then usurped many times over.

Even if he'd had the use of both hands and could walk properly, Samuel Thomas would never have returned to the ranks. Nor would he go back to the U.S.
The brand on his face was a mark of Cain to Americans and he would be a despised pariah. He might have done as some of the other Patricios had and disfigured the “D” to an unrecognizable scar, but the scar would still attract notice and raise questions, as would his crippled hand and pronounced limp. To say the maimings were war wounds would oblige him to answer queries about the unit he had served with and of some of his officers and comrades. And what of his name? “Samuel H. Thomas” was on the official roster of punished deserters, so he would have to revert to his real one or assume another one altogether. There were any number of pitfalls to such deceits, just as there were to any personal history he might invent for the past two years that did not include the war but accounted for his maimings. Such were the arguments he gave himself and he accepted them as sound enough. But the main reason he would not go home was his brother. He could neither lie to John Roger nor face him with the truth. His twin—the collegian, the man of principle—would never understand his desertion and for sure not his turned coat. Better that Johnny should imagine him dead by whatever misadventure struck his fancy than to see what had become of him. And to learn why. So he stayed in Mexico City.

Through the rest of that summer he was frequently drunk, as much to blunt his memory as to ease his chronic pains. He kept to the heart of the city, which had been little damaged by the war and where the fashionable neighborhoods of the privileged flanked the Plaza de la Constitución, the vast central square and center of the federal government. This main plaza was more commonly called the zócalo—and the term had come to refer to any town's main square that contained a cathedral and municipal building.

He got money for liquor by stealing from church poor boxes, by robbing drunks on the late-night streets. He wrested bottles from weaker men. He occasionally encountered a bartender or patron who took his branded face for a badge of honor and stood him a few drinks. He fed at the alley doors of restaurants where a man might be meted leftovers when the dinner trade was done, or in whose garbage cans he might find something still edible, but on some days he ate nothing. A friendly vendor of old clothing provided him with a shirt and pants and a woolen poncho to replace his tattered uniform. He somehow obtained a sombrero. From a distance he looked like one more dispossessed peón at large on the capital's teeming streets. He slept in the parks. When the weather was inclement he took shelter in pulquerías, the most squalid of drinking places but where a man could sleep undisturbed in a corner among a litter of other homeless drunks. He spent his days ambling about the central city. He washed at public fountains. He sat on park benches and observed without curiosity the city's passing spectacle. He had lost all interest in the doings of the world and ignored even discarded newspapers and broadsheets except as insulation against cold nights. He one day saw a former Patricio comrade on the
street, wearing a spanking new Mexican army uniform, and ducked into the crowd before the soldier caught sight of him.

His was a solitary existence and by now he could conceive of no other. But the streets were especially dangerous for a man alone. The capital was rife with rateros and brutos—thieves and roving gangs of young thugs—and the city's police force of the time was small and poorly trained. People of the better classes did not venture outside after dark except in groups and with hired bodyguards. The first time he was set upon was in the darkness of a park where he slept in the shrubbery, and he lost a front tooth and was robbed of his shoes. The episode clarified to him the severity of his handicaps and how dim-witted he was to be weaponless. From a marketplace meat stall he stole a boning knife and honed its curved seven-inch blade sharper still on the stone rim of a fountain. Two nights later when a trio of thugs swooped on him he slashed the throat of one and wounded both of the others before they scrabbled away in a cursing retreat. He stripped the sandals from the one he killed, took the few centavos in his pocket. In the months that followed he killed at least three more assailants and bloodied a number of others in driving them off. He gained a daunting reputation among the local street gangs. El Yanqui Feo, they called him, and most of them eventually let him be. But he remained a challenge to young street toughs wanting to make a name for themselves, and his clothes were rarely free of recent blood stains.

So did his days pass. Each the same as the one before. Each tomorrow his vague and only future. Every dawn's waking one more astonishment. He was twenty years old and felt decrepit.