Texas

  ‘Will you sit down, sir?’

  ‘I will,’ Ludwig said fiercely. ‘Now tell me, how did you get to know my daughter?’

  ‘I saw her … twice … when I came to fetch Ernst.’

  ‘What kind of secrets did you have with her?’

  ‘None. We never spoke.’

  ‘And just looking …?’

  ‘Yes, just from looking, and from what Ernst told me.’

  ‘Did he discuss his sister?’

  ‘Never. But he told me of your family, and I decided …’

  Otto could not continue. Either Mr. Allerkamp understood what impels a young man to sell his land and travel so far into a wilderness, or he did not, and if he had forgotten what tremendous pressures of emotion and longing and desire a mere glimpse of a beautiful girl could arouse, there was no sense in talking. Nor could Otto speak of the nights along the Ohio River when he first became aware of what a home was, nor of his intense sense of tragedy when Martin Ascot was killed during the murder of the Comanche, leaving pretty Betsy Belle a widow, nor of the fact, to put it simply, that he was in love and had been for a long time.

  Abruptly, Ludwig asked: ‘Are you Catholic?’

  Firmly, Otto answered: ‘I had to be, for my father to get us land.’

  ‘Are you a Catholic now?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Well, shouldn’t all Irishmen be Catholic?’

  ‘I’m not Irish.’

  Allerkamp was startled: ‘What are you?’

  ‘Scots. My father moved to Ireland years ago, then left.’

  ‘You’re a Scotchman?’

  ‘We call it Scotsman. And my mother was German.’

  Allerkamp gasped, looked at the young man sitting opposite him, and asked in a low voice: ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said we call it Scotsman, not Scotchman.’

  ‘I mean the next part.’

  ‘Oh, my mother was German. From Baltimore.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Berthe.’

  ‘I mean her last name.’

  ‘I don’t know. I never knew.’

  This Allerkamp could not believe—to have had a German mother and to have forgotten her name, the name that entitled you to membership in the greatest of all races! ‘You forgot? You forgot your mother’s German name?’

  ‘I never knew it.’

  For a moment the two sat facing each other, then Allerkamp rose with a cry of joy and embraced his newfound friend, his son-in-law to be: ‘You’re German! How wonderful!’

  Otto, who had never up to now considered his German ancestry an asset, was not allowed to remain indifferent, because Allerkamp grasped him by the shoulders, gave him a second embrace, and cried: ‘Come! We must tell her at once.’

  He dragged Otto out of the boardinghouse, obviously intending to ride the six miles out to the farm.

  ‘It’s almost dark,’ the young man protested, but Ludwig dismissed this sensible objection: ‘If she’s waited this long for you, she deserves to know.’ When Otto said nothing, Allerkamp went on: ‘We found her four good husbands—five, counting Quimper—but she’d have none of them.’ He said no more as they mounted their horses, then added: ‘We could never understand why she refused. She never mentioned your name until tonight. When Emil told us that you were at the Nimitz house.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Otto asked as they rode.

  ‘She said “He’s come to marry me.” She must have known all along.’

  The two men followed a rough road out of town, and as the stars appeared, always brighter as if to encourage them, each knew a great joy: Allerkamp realizing that his child had come safe to harbor with a trustworthy German; Macnab accepting the miracle that his strange courtship had come to such splendid fruition.

  At eight the moon appeared, waning, but still strong enough to lighten the way, so that the happy travelers rode through the best of Texas in the best of conditions. In the tall branches of one tree a brood of turkeys conversed briefly as they passed, as if they were gossiping about the strange events of this long day, and a coyote moved furtively along with them for a short distance, then cut sharply to the west in search of prey.

  They moved through gently rolling hills, with trees sparsely distributed marking the watered valleys. Live oak, post oak, ash and hickory showed their rounded forms against the sky, with cedars standing darker in the background. ‘It’s not like a proper German forest,’ Allerkamp said, ‘but it will do.’

  ‘What’s different?’ Otto asked, and the surveyor, who had mastered all the nuances of his new land, explained: ‘There we had real trees. One after another, all joined together. Here each tree stands apart … jealous of its allotted space.’ After reflecting on this for some minutes, he snapped his fingers and said: ‘Maybe that’s the difference, son. In Germany we were like the trees, all forced to live together wherever the Margrave said. In Texas each of us stands stubbornly apart, each man on his own land.’ As they made their way toward the Pedernales, Allerkamp continued his reflections: ‘Not a day passes, son, but that I think of Germany—the wine, the singing, the walks in the forest, the peasant food I knew so well, the good talk with Metzdorf at his shop. I long for those things so desperately, my heart could break.’ He turned in his saddle to face Otto: ‘You know what I don’t long for? The tyranny. The false preaching of the churchmen. The horrible day when the Margrave told my son Theo he couldn’t marry.’

  The passionate remembrance of that day which had so altered his life brought tears to his eyes, and after a moment of silence he offered Otto remarkable advice: ‘When we get to our home, if suddenly I should cry out “Macnab, you can’t have her. You can’t marry,” kick my backside, grab her, and go where you will—but find freedom.’ He was trembling; he allowed his horse to move away from Otto’s; then from the darkness that rose up between them he said: ‘Freedom is everything. Freedom is the salt of life that makes hard work palatable. Freedom is the only basis for a home, and marriage, and children.’

  In some dim way Otto had already discovered the truth of what Allerkamp was saying. He had sensed it when his father railed so bitterly against the ineptitude of Colonel Fannin: ‘Damnit, son. If a group of men are fighting for their freedom, they ought to do certain things, instantly, without thinking.’ He had perceived it also when his detachment started marching head-on into the Mexican lines at San Jacinto. No sensible men would perform such an extraordinary act unless impelled by a lust for freedom, a determination to be free. And he glimpsed the universal truth of this when he saw the new Allerkamp farm along the Pedernales, for no family would have the courage to move so far from settled areas unless it longed for the freedom which space assured.

  ‘There it is!’ Allerkamp said as he pointed to the solid house he and his sons had built. And with a sharp goading of his horse, he rode into the yard before the entrance, shouting: ‘Here he comes! Tell Franza that here he comes!’

  When the men entered the warm kitchen they found Thekla Allerkamp and her two sons sitting there. Franziska was not visible, for she had gone early to bed, and her absence caused Otto to feel a stab of disappointment. Ludwig, sensing this, shouted: ‘Franza! Out of bed! He’s come to claim you!’

  As Mrs. Allerkamp disappeared quietly into the smaller of the two bedrooms, Otto was left standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, twenty-four years old, blond hair, blue eyes, short, less than a hundred and fifty pounds, hands close to his sides and extremely nervous. ‘He came, just as she said,’ Ludwig told his sons, and he was about to say more when Thekla reappeared, leading her sleepy-eyed daughter into the bright light of the kitchen.

  For a protracted moment the two young people stood there, each looking with delight at the other, but the spell was broken when Ludwig shouted with joy that could not be misunderstood: ‘And he’s German!’

  When questions were asked, with the two lovers still gazing at each other, Ludwig explained his marvelous news: ‘He’s not Irish at all. And
he’s not Catholic, not really. He’s a good German. His mother was from Germany, from Baltimore.’ Mrs. Allerkamp and her sons breathed with relief at this extraordinary news. In order to find Franziska a long-overdue husband, they had been willing to have their unsullied German line diminished by the admission of a non-German man, even a Catholic, and to find that he was of their stock was a reassurance which they had not expected. The bloodlines would remain clean; the admission of lesser strains would be avoided; a good thing was being done and a faulty one had not happened. Otto Macnab was to their satisfaction German, and all was well with the world.

  ‘Kiss her, you dummy!’ Ernst cried, pushing his fellow Ranger forward.

  ‘You may kiss her!’ Ludwig shouted.

  And the first word Otto and Franziska shared was a kiss.

  After his resounding victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, General Taylor could well have thundered across the Rio Grande and chased the demoralized Mexicans all the way to some logical stopping point like San Luis Potosí far to the south, but he was an extremely cautious man who could not visualize penetrating so far into enemy territory without his supply lines in good order. He dawdled away the months of May, June, July and much of August before making a move against the northern Mexico fortress city of Monterrey, and when he finally did start, he had no clear idea of what route to follow.

  In his confusion he called upon Captain Garner to take sixteen of his Rangers and a unit of dragoons to explore the long southern route via Linares while regular army scouting parties surveyed the more direct but potentially dangerous route along the Rio Grande. Garner elected to take with him his usual companions: Panther Komax, who had proved himself a terror during the two big battles, and Otto Macnab, now back from Fredericksburg, whom Garner called ‘my artillery on the right.’

  The Rangers headed due south to explore the possibility of a route through the small town of San Fernando, and since it formed an important launch point for a dash westward to Linares, they anticipated a difficult fight. But when they approached San Fernando, with Macnab and Komax slipping ahead as scouts, they found the place undefended, so the dragoons placed their Negro cook at the head of the column, where, on a fiddle he had brought with him from Alabama, he played a screechy ‘Yankee Doodle’ while the surprised victors marched into the empty town.

  In their attack on the next little town, Granada, the Rangers behaved differently, leaving the regular troops ashen-faced. The unimportant little town lay to the west, toward Linares, and was defended by a ragtag rear-guard of the regular Mexican army. When these troops satisfied themselves that the norteamericanos seriously outnumbered and outgunned them, they fired a few shots and withdrew, but a handful of village youths decided to protect their settlement.

  From atop the roofs of houses they sniped at the invaders, and by ill luck, killed a Ranger named Corley who rode with a good friend named Lucas. When Lucas saw his companion fall from this casual fire, he dashed into the village and began shooting at anyone or anything he saw. His fire was so intense that other Rangers believed him to be in peril, so in they dashed, Komax and Macnab among them, and now the firing became so furious that houses were pocked with bullet holes.

  Soon Captain Garner and his men were in the heart of the village, where the killing became so general that a regular from Illinois listened in a state of shock: ‘What in hell are they doing in there?’

  He could not know that Otto Macnab had been at the massacre at Goliad, or that Panther Komax had one evening been forced at gunpoint to pick a bean from a clay pot and then watch as his friends who picked black were shot, or that Ranger Lucas had just lost his best friend, or that Ranger Tumlinson had seen his father’s ranch near the Strip burned to nothing and his father slain by bandits who called themselves Mexican patriots. The Illinois man could not conceive of the general hatred with which most of the Rangers viewed all Mexicans, nor appreciate why, now that sniper fire had endangered them, they wanted to punish the little town for every accumulated wrong they thought they had suffered: substantial ones like real murders and burnings, imaginary ones like whispered tales of Mexican barbarities.

  When Lieutenant Colonel Cobb read reports of the incident at Granada, he was so shaken by the brutal behavior of his Texans that he conducted personal interviews with all regulars who had information about the slaughter, and when he was satisfied that the evidence was accurate, he marched in to General Taylor’s tent and demanded that the Rangers be dismissed from the army and sent home.

  ‘That I cannot do,’ Taylor said flatly.

  ‘They will destroy your army, sir.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By their senseless slaughter of Mexicans. They’ll ignite the whole countryside against you.’

  ‘That’s a risk I must take. I need them as my eyes and ears.’

  ‘You know that they take no prisoners?’

  ‘Santa Anna took none of them prisoner.’

  ‘Are we to descend to Santa Anna’s level?’

  ‘Texans are different. They were their own nation. They have their own rules. But remind them that this time they aren’t fighting Santa Anna.’

  ‘Respectfully, sir, I see only tragedy ahead. Send them home. Now!’

  General Taylor, always mindful of difficult tasks to come, refused, and a month later even Cobb was quite satisfied to have the Texans on the scene, for when the army reached Monterrey everyone saw that the capture of this sizable city, with its numerous forts, gun emplacements and interlocking alleyways that armed civilians could defend, was not going to be easy. East of the city the ground was relatively flat, but it too was guarded by numerous forts, each with its own heavy artillery; and west of the city, on the important road to Saltillo, rose two small mountains, not unduly large but high enough and protected by slopes that looked impossible to scale.

  The mountain on the south flank of the road was Federación, topped by a substantial fort; the one to the north was Independencia, topped by a massive, stout-walled, dilapidated building called the Bishop’s Palace. To capture Monterrey, these two peaks must be taken; if they were left in Mexican hands, enemy artillery would make retention of the city impossible.

  The Texas Rangers, supported by a much larger cadre of the best regular army troops under General Worth, were assigned to take the two mountains while Taylor took the city itself, and on the night of 19 September amid a downpour the Texans moved in a wide circle to the north, coming down to the Saltillo road, where on the next day they captured that highway. Now all they had to do was climb two mountains in the face of heavy enemy fire and capture a fort on one of them, a stout-walled, defended palace on the other.

  On 22 September, a rainy Monday morning, General Worth decided to make the attempt on Federación and its fort. His men spent the first six hours gaining, with much difficulty, positions from which to launch the charge up the final slopes, and at noon all was ready. ‘We go,’ Captain Garner called with no discernible emotion.

  Up the formidable steeps the Texans went, and whenever they were pinned down by enemy fire, the regular troops, just as brave, surged forward in their sector, but as the miserably hot afternoon unfolded, the wiry Texans had one advantage: they were accustomed to the oppressive heat and the rivers of sweat that poured down their faces.

  ‘Give ’em hell,’ Garner called quietly, and on his Rangers went.

  Incredibly, they gained the crest of the mountain and diverted so many defenders that the panting regulars soon took their sector too. Without cheers or battle cries, the regular officer in charge simply pointed at the waiting fort, and like an army of remorseless ants attacking a parcel of food, they started across the top of the mountain and literally overwhelmed the fort, not by sheer numbers, but by the terrible firepower and irresistible force they represented.

  At three that hot, wet afternoon Federación and its fort were in their hands, but before the Texans could congratulate themselves, Garner pointed north across the chasm that separated them from Independe
ncia and said: ‘Tomorrow we take that.’

  Without adequate food and with no tents or protection from the intermittent rains, the Rangers passed a short, fitful night, during which Lucas, who had led the slaughter at Granada, asked Otto Macnab: ‘Do you think we can climb that one? It looks steeper.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘That stone building. Much stouter than the fort.’

  ‘We’ll find out.’

  ‘Were you afraid, today? I mean, you’re so much younger than me.’ When Otto made no reply, Lucas confessed: ‘I was scared real bad.’

  ‘Only natural.’

  ‘Tomorrow, can I fight alongside you? I never seen a man fire as fast as you can.’

  ‘I always fight with Panther Komax.’

  ‘I know. But can I sort of trail along?’

  ‘Nobody stopping you.’

  At three in morning, when the rains ceased, the Rangers launched their attack on Independencia, but now the rocky slopes were so steep and slick that it seemed absolutely impossible that they could be scaled. ‘Christ, this can’t be done,’ but then came the quiet voice of Garner, that indomitable man who found handholds where none existed: ‘A little more,’ and up the struggling men went.

  This time they left the regular troops well behind, but close to the top their sector became so steep that each man had to fend for himself, and the regulars moved well ahead over their easier terrain. At this perilous point, with Mexican riflemen shooting down from the rim of their protected hilltop, Otto found himself with Lucas, who was on the verge of exhaustion.

  ‘Breathe deep,’ Otto said, and extending his right leg so that Lucas could grasp it, he pulled the near-fainting man up to the next level. There they rested, unable to catch any breath, but soon Otto pointed to a declivity in the rocks and said: ‘Looks easy,’ and he led Lucas up a steep incline and onto the crest of the hill.