Crockett of Tennessee Read online

  “If I die and you live, Davy, I want you to have my money. I keep it in my left boot, in a pocket stitched into the lining. There’s maybe six hundred dollars left.”

  “I can’t take that money, Persius. I wouldn’t feel right, spending stolen money.”

  “I reckon I shouldn’t have told you, then.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  David picked up Persius’s old fiddle. He had brought it out of the barracks to while away time with during breaks in the fighting. He plucked the strings with his thumb, fingering out an old tune.

  “You’ve learned to play that thing already, Davy?”

  “Just a bit.”

  “I’ll be. You’re a better man than me even on the fiddle.”

  “I ain’t a better man. Here I am, right up on fifty years old, and all I’ve got is a political career that went bust on me, a pile of debts, and a few thousand Mexicans wanting to send me to meet Jesus soon as possible.”

  Persius smiled. “Don’t get low-spirited, David. This here may be the end, but we can make it the glory-time if we want to.”

  David looked at Persius sharply. “What did you say?”

  “I said, we could make this the glory-time, if we want to.”

  The dream-image of his Uncle Jimmy flashed across his mind. You’ll know the glory-time only when the glory-time comes. Go into the shining, David Crockett, and shout your hallelujah!

  God above! David thought. Is this the destiny I’ve been waiting for? Is this what my life has been leading up to … is this why my name will be remembered when I’m gone? Could it be that sometimes a man finds his real glory-time, his shining, only at the end of his days?

  “Into the shining.” He whispered the words to himself.

  “Did you say something, David?”

  “No. Nothing at all.”

  “I’m thinking I’m going to take that money out of my boot and throw it down the well yonder. I ain’t going to need it no more. You sure you don’t want it, Dave?”

  “I don’t believe I’ll be needing it either, Persius. You go ahead, if that’s what you want.”

  Persius dug out the bills. Looking at them, he sighed. “I never thought I’d come to the place of throwing several hundred dollars down a deuced well.” He hacked and coughed a few moments, then rose.

  “Well, here goes.” He strode across the pitted, trampled earth and tossed the bills into the well.

  “Lord have mercy,” David heard him say. “Lord have mercy on a fool like me.”

  Chapter 59

  There was one good thing that happens to men who are likely to die very soon, David Crockett discovered. It takes away some of their need to struggle so hard for survival. Oddly, it gives them moments of near fearlessness, moments when they stand ready to accept without resistance what fate has thrown their way.

  Right now there was little evidence of fear on the part of anyone defending the Alamo. The cold wind had died down, and the light rain that came in its place was much easier to endure. As evening fell and the fighting lulled, David decided it was time to inject some fun into the atmosphere. He grabbed up Persius’s old fiddle and bow and marched over to one John McGregor, a Scotsman who was one of the several Europeans among the defenders of this old mission.

  “McGregor, you sorry old coot of a Scot, I’m an Irish fiddler, name of Crockett, and I can fiddle you into the ground while you try to squeeze a tune out of that dead cat or whatever it is you call a music-maker! I’m challenging you to a duel, you mangy son of men in dresses!”

  “Ah! Is that so, you bloody Irishman? I’ll fetch out me pipes and we’ll see about who’s the music-maker good and quick!”

  “Go get ’em, highlander! I’ll learn you quick how a tune ought to sound!”

  McGregor trotted off to his barracks to get out one of the oddest items to have been brought inside the Alamo: a set of authentic Scottish bagpipes. McGregor was quite good at playing them and treasured them highly. In a few moments he was back out with them, blowing through the mouthpiece and getting his arm into position on the bellows.

  “Play your best, Scotsman!” David shouted, winking at the weary men gathering around them.

  McGregor began playing, the droning notes carrying far into the night, even over the Alamo walls. David grinned, imagining the puzzlement of the Mexicans who were close enough to hear. Well, they ain’t heard a thing yet, he thought, and put the fiddle to his chin.

  He dragged the bow across the strings and set into a ragged version of an old mountain fiddle tune. He couldn’t play it fancy like good fiddlers could, but he did manage to make the tune recognizable. Never mind that it was not the same tune McGregor was playing, nor even in the same key. It made a wild ruckus of noise, and the men of the Alamo seemed to relish it.

  “Saw that thing in half, Colonel!” someone yelled.

  “Squish on that cat, McGregor! You can outplay old Canebrake Davy any day!”

  “The devil he can! I’ll put my money on the colonel.”

  “You ain’t got no money.”

  “I got beauty. A pretty face the women dearly love to kiss on.”

  The banter made for much better music in David’s ears than any of the tortured sounds he and McGregor rendered. Banter and lightheartedness were just what was needed right now. This was almost surely a doomed garrison—he knew it, and all the men here knew it. The latest emissaries to slip in through Mexican lines had reported that Fannin was indeed on his way, but by now it hardly mattered if he got here. There were far too many. Mexicans surrounding the Alamo for any significant relief to get through.

  And so Crockett fiddled and McGregor played his pipes, fiddled and played defiantly in the face of impending death.

  David had expected that there would be few or no encouraging developments from here on out, but he was proven wrong a few hours before dawn when Lieutenant George Kimball and some thirty members of his Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers were ushered through the Alamo gate. It was a stunning event, heartening beyond words, and if it meant little in terms of significantly strengthening the compound, it meant much in terms of symbolism and defiance of Santa Anna.

  The intense darkness brought by the bad weather was what had allowed Kimball and company to make it through. Their arrival sent spirits soaring; even the usually serious Travis was so happy that he declared just a little of the increasingly precious gunpowder could be used to fire upon a particularly prominent target, a house on Bexar’s Main Plaza … a house some declared was the very headquarters of Santa Anna.

  They fired it off as the wind-whipped morning came on. It was a successful shot. A big chunk of the house blew to rubble, causing the Alamo defenders to cheer.

  And then David’s eye caught sight of a man in fine uniform running toward the damaged building. His heart raced. Santa Anna himself! Judging from the uniform and the way those around him acted, Santa Anna it surely had to be! He raised his rifle, lifted its sight above its target in hopes of sending the ball arcing down to hit the man, and fired. It was a vain shot, but worth the effort. He didn’t consider it wasted powder at all.

  Time passed, and the fate of the Alamo became more and more clear. Additional Mexican reinforcements swarmed into town; estimates now had about twenty-five hundred Mexican soldiers around the mission, and many more on their way. As time passed, the Mexicans moved their emplacements ever closer, and dug new trenches under the Alamo’s very walls. David and his marksmen killed many who exposed their forms a moment too long, but by now the killing was almost symbolic. There were far too many Mexicans out there for any hope of defeating them. Even if every remaining rifle ball inside the walls found a heart as its target, there would be more than enough Mexicans remaining to wipe out the garrison.

  On March third a courier made it through the Mexican lines and came in with grim tidings. Fannin would not be coming at all. The courier, an old friend of Travis’s named James Butler Bonham, reported that Fannin’s efforts to reach the miss
ion had been thwarted by the high waters of the San Antonio River, which had broken up many of his wagons in the water. And by the time that problem had been overcome, Fannin had learned that a small band of Texans under Colonel Frank Johnson had been wiped out at San Patricio. He made for that place rather than the Alamo, believing it would soon be attacked again and that he could better serve the revolution at San Patricio. No one faulted him. It was a sensible decision, one Travis would have made himself had the circumstances been reversed.

  There was no question now that the Alamo’s fate was sealed. On March fourth the continuing Mexican cannonade paid off for Santa Anna when a large hole was knocked through the north wall. The Alamo defenders struggled to throw debris back into the gap, but the Mexicans hit them all the harder with mortar and cannon fire. The area inside the walls became so dusty that David and his riflemen could scarcely see what was going on elsewhere in the compound.

  “I don’t much like this being hemmed in, Persius,” David said. “I believe I’d rather die out in the open.”

  “Dying’s all the same, wherever it happens,” Persius replied. “Be strong, David Crockett. Take as many of them with you as you can.”

  “I intend to. I intend to.”

  On the next evening, Travis called the men together. They made a motley, sorry sight—huddled together, caked in dirt and sweat and mud, clothes ragged and ruined, hair filthy and stringing down the sides of their whiskered faces. Only one of the number could not stand, and that was Bowie, who had been carried out on his cot.

  Travis looked them over, face-to-face, then spoke.

  “Our fate is sealed,” he said. “Within a few days, maybe a few hours, we shall all be facing our eternity. This is our destiny and there’s nothing we can do to avoid it. Our doom is certain.

  “All we can do is die here in our fort and fight to the end, and sell our lives dear.”

  He drew his sword and with its end drew a clear line in the dirt. “Any man determined to remain here and die with me, let him step across this line.”

  For a moment there was no movement, then one man stepped forward, and another, and another. Bowie, more lucid today than the time Persius had gone to his room, had his cot carried across; if he and Travis had quarreled over authority before, the squabble was now forgotten. They were two men of one cause.

  In the end all were across the line with Travis, except for one man, Louis Rose, a Frenchman with battle experience going back to the Napoleonic wars.

  Bowie pushed himself up on his elbows. “Rose, you don’t seem willing to go to the end with us.”

  David joined in, gently. “Old fellow, you might as well come die with us. There’s no escape.”

  Rose shook his head. “No. I’ve seen enough of death and battle in my life. I’ll not remain.”

  He turned and ran toward the wall. Clambering up with skill remarkable for an old fellow, he made the top, then dropped over. No one tried to stop him, nor did any look to see where he went, or if he made it far alive.

  Travis thanked his men and dismissed them, and they scattered back to their posts to await the end. Persius happened to glance at David just as something slipped from David’s bullet pouch and fell to the ground. Stooping and picking it up, Persius saw it was the silver nugget David always carried. He was about to yell to David and tell him he had it, but Travis called for David first, ordering him to come for a conference. Persius put the silver into his pocket. He could return it later, when David wasn’t busy.

  Later. Would there be any more of later to be had? He looked at the walls and sensed the thousands of antagonistic human presences outside them. The feeling was like being in the palm of a hand that was curling into a tight, crushing fist. Crushing steadily and slowly, like the pain that burned in his chest every time he coughed.

  David was walking beside Persius an hour later when the fearlessness that had protected him vanished suddenly and panic took its place. This was cold, wrenching panic that swept him unexpectedly, just like the time alone in his rooms in Washington City when his nerve gave out and a sense of inadequacy overcame him. He gasped for breath and slumped to the side, hand against an adobe wall, and gazed wildly about.

  “David, what’s wrong with you?” Persius asked, putting his hand out to steady his friend.

  David brushed the hand away. “Don’t touch me! Get away from me—need to … breathe.”

  “David, you all right?”

  David lurched off into a dark corner and sank to his knees, where he heaved his stomach empty. Rising, he stepped off deeper into the shadows. Persius followed. He found David leaning against a wall, palms flat against it as if he had been shoved up for a search. Persius put his hands on David’s shoulders and felt him tense.

  “Davy, Davy, it’s all right. The fear has hit you, that’s all.”

  David turned, shrugging off Persius’s touch. Here in the dark it was difficult to make out his face. “I am afraid, Persius. I haven’t been before … not like this, at least. We’re going to die here. You understand that, Persius? We’re going to die!”

  “I know, Davy. I know. But there ain’t no news in that. We’re born to die, Davy, every one of us. Only difference between us and most everybody else is that we know when and where it’s going to be. That’s all.”

  “I’m afraid. Look at me, Persius! I’m shaking!”

  “Of course you’re afraid. I am too. Ain’t a man here not afraid.”

  “I can’t be afraid, not me. I’m Crockett. I’m Cane-brake Davy. I’m half horse, half alligator. The man who wrung the tail off the comet.”

  “I know you are, Davy. So do all these men here. That’s why you’re going to get past this. You’re going to put that fear behind you right now, and walk back out there, and fight like the man you are.” Persius stopped and coughed; he tasted blood and felt weakened a few seconds. With a great wrench of will, he forced the strength back into himself, then looked at his friend. “It’s gone now, David. The fear’s come and now it’s gone, because there’s nothing to be gained from it.”

  “Gone …”

  “That’s right, Davy. It’s gone. No need for it any more. Just let it fly off, like a bird, way up in the sky yonder. Ain’t no need for fear. This is our time, Davy. Our time.”

  “The glory-time …”

  “That’s right, David. The glory-time. There’s men out there with their eye on you. You’re the only thing keeping the fear away from them. You’re joking and grinning and fiddling and such—it gives them courage they wouldn’t have had without you. Maybe that’s why you’re here, Davy, to make the little men and the scared men into big and brave men. Hang on to your courage. You’ve always cared about the little men, Davy. Remember who you are. You’re Screamer Crockett. You’re the man from the cane. You’re Crockett of Tennessee, and your glory-time has come. Don’t you miss it. Don’t you miss a bit of it, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  And strange as it seemed, after that David wasn’t afraid anymore. He was sad, and thought frequently and fondly of his family back in Tennessee … but it wasn’t fear that stirred his heart, only the love of a husband and father bound never to see his loved ones again. Why should he be afraid? This was the glory-time. This was the shining. This was the moment he had been born for, and he intended to meet it with dignity.

  Persius was right. He was here to show how a man could face his death the right way. He was here not only as a man, but also as a legend. And it was his duty to live up to it.

  And so his fear died. As did the last of any harsh attitude toward Persius Tarr. It seemed astonishing to him now that he had ever tried to hide his associations with this man. For years Persius had been the shame of David Crockett. Now he was his inspiration.

  Persius Tarr was facing the end of his days with a courage that surprised and awed him. And if Persius could do that, by heaven, David Crockett could do no less.

  Chapter 60

  The end began with the first hint of dawn and was he
ralded not with gunshots, but cheers. Inside the north wall of the Alamo a sentinel halted his pacing and listened, with comprehension and terror rising simultaneously, to the harsh chorus of Mexican shouts.

  “Viva Santa Anna! Viva Santa Anna!”

  The sentinel clambered up an earthen cannon emplacement and peered over the wall. Just as dawn broke through in the east, he saw them coming in a great swarm, bearing ladders and pikes. Across the pounded and pitted earth, into and across the moatlike ditch, and toward the north wall.

  “The Mexicans are coming!” he yelled, leaping back to the ground and darting toward the barracks. “Colonel Travis, wake up! The Mexicans …”

  Travis was the first to respond to the call, but in mere seconds the grim news spread among the men, who sat up drowsy and cold, then rose, instantly awake and oblivious to the chill. Rifles clattered; there were muffled grunts and oaths and prayers as men pulled on boots, slid on shirts and jackets, slapped on hats.

  David Crockett and Persius Tarr, who had jerked awake at the same moment, were among those in the scramble. They glanced at each other; the time had come for last words. But there were none. All that needed saying had already been said days before, months before, years before. They snatched up their rifles and headed out into the growing light.

  A glance toward the north wall revealed ladder tops just now leaning into place above the wall’s rim. David picked out Travis’s voice amid the hubbub. “Give them hell, boys! Hurrah! Hurrah! Give them hell!”

  “Look at him, Persius! That’s an officer there, a real officer.” David glanced down to check the lock of his rifle. When he glanced up again, Travis was firing a shotgun over the wall, aiming almost straight down. The Mexicans were immediately at hand now. “He’ll give them hell, all right!” David continued, “And I intend to do the … God! He’s shot!”

  Persius had already seen it. Travis spasmed and pitched backward, his shotgun falling from his hands, a spray of blood exploding from his head. He had taken a bullet through the forehead. Now his body, dying as it fell, pitched off the cannon platform and onto the sloping earth built up against the inside wall. There he lay, legs sprawled; head bloodied and drooping to the side. For him, the battle for the Alamo had ended very quickly.