In the Rogue Blood by James Carlos Blake

Author:James Carlos Blake [Blake, James Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062227843
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

2

While diplomatic efforts to avoid war continued between Washington and Mexico City, Taylor was under orders to stay in place and take no hostile action except in response to Mexican attack. Rumors were rife, the most common of them that the Mexicans across the river were waiting only for the arrival of several more regiments before making their charge. Against that possibility Taylor ordered work to begin immediately on an earthen defense work to be called Fort Texas. It was positioned on the bluff and would have five sides. Its outer walls would be nine feet high and fifteen feet thick. Toward its construction each regiment provided daily labor in the form of rotating fatigue details, and as compensation each man on the detail received a gill of whiskey at the end of the day’s work. Required to work with the construction crews every day but denied the whiskey allowance were all men under punishment, including John Little and Jack Riley, who had to labor with ball and chain. They fetched and carried materials and tools, mixed buckets of mud mortar, applied pick and shovel, and all the while cursed the army that treated them less like soldiers than as beasts of burden.

Lucas Malone volunteered for the labor detail at every opportunity and so on most days found himself working in proximity to John and Riley. John introduced Lucas and Handsome Jack to each other one sultry afternoon when they were all shoveling construction debris into wheelbarrows along the fort’s south wall. Thunderheads were rising like bloodstained purple towers over the Gulf and the sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses of Matamoros. Riley asked what part of Ireland his family was from. Lucas said County Galway and Riley grinned widely. “But that’s me birthplace, man! Some Malones lived a few miles north of us. Could they have been kin?” Lucas said they might have been but he couldn’t be sure. They’d had lots of Malone kin in the old country but his granddaddy had fled the sod after killing a man in a donnybrook. He’d kept on running after reaching New York and didn’t stop until he made Tennessee.

Riley asked Lucas why he volunteered for the labor gang. “Bad enough to have to do this as punishment,” he said.

“Because I’d anytime ruther work like a man,” said Lucas, “than march around on a drill field playin at being a soldier. March and drill, drill and march. That’s all we do in this fuckin army camp.”

“Dont be calling it an army camp,” Riley said. “It’s a bloody prison is what it is.”

Remembering the city prison in New Orleans, John thought Handsome Jack was wrong about that. “Hell Jack, it’s only another seven days with these ornaments on our legs,” he said.

“Only seven days left this time,” Riley said. “Then comes the next time, and maybe we’ll wear them sixty days, or ninety. Maybe next time it’ll be the fucking yoke for a month or so. Maybe it’ll be the bloody lash.

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