Adios, San Patricios
By Paul D. Mooney
My fingers are gone. My fingers, wiggling digits that sprouted from my hand in all their mundane utility my whole life, are gone. Quite a thought to process.
Not all my fingers, granted. Just two, both on the right. Still, parts of me are no longer parts of me. I've involuntarily bid them farewell. Adios, as they say down here. That's our foes' word for "goodbye." A fellow in my company who spent some years around the border back when Texas was still part of Mexico explained that the word essentially means "go with god." Speakers of Spanish, a language based directly on the Latin of Old Rome, wish those that separate from them be with god as they go on their different ways. I admit it's quite a dramatic way to say goodbye, and I'm not even what most would consider a pious sort.
The actual circumstances of mine and my fingers' parting were far less poetic. One moment I was screaming like a wild man alongside a few hundred similarly hollering and identically dressed men full of the fury of battle as we charged across a dirt bridge spanning a muddy little river. The next I was screaming a very different scream, my left hand desperately clutching my mangled right. I don't remember the sound or feeling of the bullet hitting me. I don't remember my bayonet-tipped musket falling from my grip. I don't remember collapsing off to the side, through some reflex or stroke of luck, and away from the trampling boots of my comrades as they continued the charge. I just remember the start of our attack followed immediately by my violent removal from it. And for a full day after that lightning flash of clear realization, the moment I understood what happened, the memories are a hazy blend of fever dreams capped off by coming to in the hospital tent. Hell, I didn't know until the surgeon told me later that General Pierce himself pointed me out and called for a stretcher.
I doubt my fingers are with god. What would he want with a pair of fingers, let alone mine? No, whatever remains of them lies somewhere along or under the sandy banks of that shallow waterway in this dusty, sunbaked land.
Could be worse, I suppose. A man can live with only three fingers on one of his hands. Particularly if the other one's whole. The surgeon said the feeling should come back in the wounded one once the shock of it all wears off. The man surely knows his trade, so I don't doubt it. Wouldn't want to doubt it, anyway. Living with eight fingers is one thing, but with only one working hand strikes me as a fair sight harder.
Lucky for me my left hand's my strong one. That Mexican musket ball could just as likely blown much more vital parts of me clean off. Or punctured them with ragged holes the size of dinner plates. There were certainly enough bodies bearing such disfigurements and worse bobbing in the Rio Churubusco on the day I suffered my comparatively mild wound. Yes, with a little perspective it's easy to see how lucky I was on that dismal day two weeks past. Luckier than a few hundred of my fellow Americans who didn't see nightfall on that miserable little river. Luckier than the who knows how many Mexicans who met the same fate. Luckier than the yet unknown number of boys in both armies now waking under the walls of nearby Chapultepec Castle to their final morning on this earth. And far, far luckier still than those thirty men of the Batallón San Patricios standing in wagon beds in a row beneath the long gibbet atop a nearby hill.
I'd never heard of these men or their unit before this morning. Not before a jowly sergeant with a splinted leg and crude crutch hobbled up beside me and explained with a tobacco flecked smile who the condemned men are and why their situation is as such.
Irishmen who signed up to fight against us. Some even deserters from our own Army. Fellows the sergeant made abundantly clear he despised. Men who, for one reason or another, joined with the Mexican cause. They look like regular fellows, regular soldiers. Uniforms are a bit different, of course. Some paler than me, some tanner. Some with red hair, some with shades of brown or black. There are scruffy beards and freshly shaved faces, tall frames and stocky ones. But this troop of men about to die the death of traitors and murderers doesn't look much different from the one I marched amid with a musket on my shoulder.
The only one who stands out as odd is a fellow seated in a chair in one of the wagons. Must be wounded in the leg or legs. And they're still gonna hang him with his brethren. Cruel. Though I suppose it would be crueler to hang his friends today and force him to face the same fate alone once he heals. I wonder how he feels about the matter.
Today's battle will soon begin in the not-so-far distance. Near enough that the doomed men will see those engaged as they fight and vice versa. Which is the whole point of it, as the lame sergeant beside me explains.
"The second," he snaps his fingers halfway through the word "second" with such vigor it makes me blink, "our flag goes up over that citadel, we drop all thirty Micks. The second!" He snaps his fingers again to reiterate.
I nod, hoping the non-verbal acknowledgement deters further repetition and snapping. We two invalids plus a hollow-cheeked young artillery private with a bandage over his missing left eye lean against a chest high, wood rail fence at the foot of the hill to watch the proceedings. All three of us were, as we readily shared with each other, wounded during the bloody mess by the Churubusco. All now relegated to watching the final push of this war against our nation's southern neighbor. And all independently, not knowing each other before today, chose a vantage point overseeing both the hangings and our comrades' fight up the enemy's last stronghold.
I awoke hours before dawn in one of the many long canvas tents reserved for the convalescing and, unable to fall back asleep, proceeded to wander with no planned route through the Army's camp. Only when the horizon began to glow did I realize how long I'd perambulated, how soon the battle was set to begin, and that thirty men stood on wagons with necks in nooses atop a nearby hill. Morbid curiosity moved me to where I now stand, unexpectedly surprised that a few dozen upcoming deaths shook me more than the many others due to occur today.
The wolfish, leering grin of the sergeant makes his motivation for watching the doomed Hibernians swing plain and clear. The private's face, what little of it is un-swaddled in bandages, betrays nothing about his reasons for being here. He seems saddened, but he has fair enough cause to be, executions or not. And, in my experience, some folks simply have sad faces.
The officer in charge of the hanging, a balding colonel with a jutting, well-trimmed bush of a beard, sits astride a dark brown horse not far from me. The men in the nooses direct a fair amount of noise directly at him, shouting swears and epithets to little noticeable effect. Perhaps because the colonel displays what strikes me as a naturally stony expression with a furious, hateful glint in his eyes to match.
It's still fairly dark out. The glow of the impending sun makes the world visible, but it has not yet risen into view. Should soon. The impending day stretches to begin and set off the bloody fray. The smell of dust is heavier than it was earlier. A lot more men moving about, stirring it up. And the sound of insects, animals, and birds is significantly fainter than one usually hears near dawn. Signs of a great mass of people on the move.
The smallest arc of yellow-white pops up over the eastern horizon.
Thunder booms. Chalky little clouds bloom and hug the ground in the distance. Artillery. Our artillery. It's begun. My lord, it's begun.
The private flinches.
The sergeant waves his hat in the hair with a joyous whoop, "Give 'em hell, boys! Give them bastards hell!"
Puffs of ecru flower and linger where our shells strike the castle walls. I raise my hand to my brow to try and block some of the sunlight from my eyes only to find it less useful than I imagined.
Of course. As is habit, I used my left, which provides significantly less shade than it used to.
How I wish I was among my brothers in blue waiting behind those guns for the barrage to cease and the charge to start. What I would give to feel a musket in my hands.
I don't doubt that when I reach the sum total of my days, the one I spent at Churubusco will rank among the worst. Haven't had a worse one yet, though I am a young man. But that feeling as we attacked? That brilliant ball of bright, white courage and thrill in my guts when they gave the order to charge was like nothing I ever felt before. Like being part of an angry sea, a single drop in our great wave of howling blue rolling as a singular, consolidated force of nature. I joined up expecting to enjoy the fighting life, but never in all my expectations of adventure did I imagine the sensations of my very first, and likely only, attack as a soldier of the United States.
What will I do without soldiery as a career option? Not wearing the blue, at least. Not with an incomplete set of hands. Perhaps another army might take me. But would the thrills remain? Without the underlying vein of love of country? Without the echoes of my father boasting about touching off his gun crew's canon again and again, the shells arcing over the ramparts of Fort McHenry back in '13, ringing in my ears? Could I join a military troop that would take me merely to join an army, any army, that would accept an eight-fingered soldier?
I bet the San Patriciois could help me understand the ins and outs of the mercenary life. Some of them, based on what the sergeant said, fall into that purely professional category of fighters as opposed to the principled sort. But all I know for sure of those fellows, beyond them all being Irish, is rumors and secondhand. All funneled into the jumble of hateful bile the sergeant grumbled about the poor bastards.
The aforementioned scuttlebutt that there are more than a few deserters of our own ranks among theirs seems plausible enough that I don't doubt its veracity. Can't help but wonder why those particular San Patricios switched allegiances.
The marked difference in national faith does make sense as a reason, the more I consider it. Not that our nation has an officially designated religion. It very purposefully does not. Nor does Mexico, I'm fairly certain. But with my countrymen tending towards the various faiths in the vein of Martin Luther and the Mexicans predominantly adhering to the old church of Rome, I suppose the divide is real though not codified. My parents were of the Methodist strain, though our family was never particularly fiery about it. Certainly not enough that it could drive me to trade my uniform for another.
So if a vague promise of heaven couldn't entice me to fight under a strange flag I doubt a simple desire for the soldier's life could. It's not a life I've seen much of, anyhow. Just what I've experienced in these few months since silly romantic notions drove me to make my mark on enlistment papers.
No, I don't think I'll try my incomplete hands at mercenary work. Don't think I'll fight ever again. Never prove my mettle as a lifelong campaigner. I'm merely a fellow who lost two fingers and a bucket of blood in his very first war, very first battle, very first charge. Suppose I'll have to find a new way to make a life, make a name, make a mark, seek some pride. Sure hope I can. Can't quite see how yet.
Our canons cease firing. I skip a breath at the sudden silence.
"There they go, boys! There they go!" the sergeant hollers. "Hell and thunder, there they go!"
A flood of sky blue surges up the cliffside. It's our infantry. My infantry. Thousands of my fellow American soldiers plus a smattering of Marines on loan from the Navy to thicken the fray. Up the hill they rush, the distant crackle of continuous rifle fire an arrhythmic chorus of quiet snaps.
A tightness grips my guts. A pang, like somebody reached through the skin over my belly to give the innards underneath a long, hard squeeze. I'd give the rest of my fingers to be among that blue flood rolling unnaturally up the steep hillside.
Adios, boys. Go with god up that cliff.
"Look at our lads go!" the sergeant crows. A puff of dust billows from his cap as he slaps it against an open palm. "By god, I hope they kill every damn Mexican on that damn hill! Let these rotten, traitorous Irish devils see that! See the last of their friends in sin, these bastard sons of Spain die at our guns, right before they all dance the gallows two-step!"
The colonel, no doubt overhearing the sergeant's gleeful cries, turns in his saddle to glare at we three enlisted men. His tiny frown barely creases the sides of his bearded face downwards. It lasts but a moment before he turns back to his charges. For their part, the men in nooses continue shouting and hollering, but it's more reflexive than vicious. Their attention, like mine, belongs to the battle. I watch their heads slowly tilt up as the blue horde chugs and thunders steadily up the rocky slope to Chapultepec itself.
"Ain't it something?" the sergeant slaps my shoulder with his dusty cap.
I nod.
"Ain't it something?" the sergeant reaches past me to cap-slap the private on the arm.
The private blinks his lone exposed eye at the dust that floats into it, but doesn't speak, nod, flinch, or otherwise move.
"By god, ain't it something?" the sergeant sighs in a tone I've only heard from other men when wafting out of the closed upstairs doors of saloons.
"Stand ready!" the colonel cries and for a moment I'm not sure to whom.
But I realize whom he addressed and why when I see my Army crest and cover the parapet. Blue surges over the walls of Chapultepec, drowning its battered walls. The time has nearly come. The soldiers holding the reins of the horses attached to the wagons tense in near unison.
Some of the San Patricios do much the same and go rigid as trees. Others increase the vehemence of their curses and jibes. A few go weak in the legs and teeter, knock-kneed, in their halters. Their end is near. Soon they will bid adios to the living world. And perhaps hola to god, the dead, and my fingers.
"There it goes," the private, his voice quiet but clear, mutters in a thick Yankee accent.
So it does. The broad Mexican tricolor that flapped high above the castle comes down from its pole. A few seconds later that same banner, wrapped around something large and heavy, plummets from the castle walls. Some of the noosed Irishmen let fly a final "Viva Mexico!" for the red, white, and green ensign of their adopted nation in its last visible moments. Others keep on swearing at the colonel. Some fall completely silent.
The wagons' wheels creak the second the Stars and Stripes go up. The second. The doomed men come down. Their last shouts end with a sharp chorus of heavy snaps from thirty necks breaking in one crackling, sickening heartbeat.
The sergeant spits in the dirt, his dull expression utterly unchanged. The private shuts his good eye and bows his head.
My vision blurs. I wonder if I'll faint. I raise my right hand to my throat and rub my own neck, making sure it's still a functioning anatomical structure. The touch feels strange, different than I expect of my own hand. Lacking. Because two of my fingers are gone. Adios. The harsh fact of my new infirmity clears the fog.
I see by the suspended silhouettes that one of the dead men has no legs below his knees. The one hanged from the chair. Not just wounded, an amputee. Another man who likely left a chunk of himself on the banks of the Churubusco. Now the rest of him will never leave Mexico either.
My lost fingers' stubs itch. I resist the powerful urge to scratch them, which the surgeon told me in grave tones could only hamper my recovery.
A young lieutenant on horseback near the wagons doffs his cap and wipes his forehead with it. He slaps it back on and, with a sideways glance at the dead men, trots his horse over to the colonel. From where I stand, I hear his throat clear but not what he says when leans over his horse's head to whisper to his superior.
The colonel swivels in his saddle with a glare of furious disbelief. Red faced he bawls, "I was ordered to have them hanged, and have no orders to unhang them!"
The lieutenant snaps upright in his saddle like a spring-loaded toy, salutes, and goads his horse slowly back up the hill. The colonel turns back to grimace at the dangling dead men.
The sergeant grins at me in search of commiseration as he grunts a familiar refrain, "Papists." Receiving no response beyond my intentionally blank stare he turns back to the bodies, nodding approvingly at them. After a few minutes he spits again and hobbles off, his crutch's tip grinding in the dirt.
"You think he hates them because some are traitors, for their faith, or because they're Irishmen?" the private mumbles just a hair above audible as he raises his head and reopens his good eye. Not in my direction, but at the hanged.
"Suppose a bit of all three," I say after a moment's consideration.
The private nods but says nothing.
"Names Corporal Miller, by the by. And yourself?" I verbally prod him.
"O'Malley. Private Francis O'Malley. By your leave, corporal." With a deferent nod he turns away from the hill and steps off in the direction of our camp.
The legless dead man twists slightly as he swings. I raise my wounded hand out in front of my face and squint, lining up the bandaged tops of my fingers' stumps with the ones his legs end in. Just above where his knees once were. For a moment the silhouettes match up and it looks like I've an odd little puppet on my hand. My head swims again. The image nauseates me for a short, sharp moment. Then the body spins back the other way and my fingers and his legs end in nothing once again. What was there is gone. And maybe, as the Mexicans say, with god. But I doubt it. He's about as likely to be with god as my fingers.
The bodies hang for a long time. Long after the sound of guns fades away. They're still there when I turn away to return to the convalescents' tent, leaving the San Patricios to sway ever so slightly in the dry Mexican breeze.
Paul D. Mooney is an award-winning writer and filmmaker from New York. A USMC veteran and graduate of Boston University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Stony Brook University, he's had fiction published in The Writing Disorder, American Writers Review, The Big Jewel, three minute plastic, and Change Seven. You can read more of Paul's work here: https://www.thewritepaulmooney.com/