They churned downriver through days of surpassing loveliness and then entered an unseasonable heat broken by sporadic rainfall. When they were not sopped with rain they were sodden with sweat. They passed by a sequence of port towns and made brief moorings at some of them for fuel and supplies. Towns loud and rough and seeming like foreign countries, so profuse were they with Negroes, with the drawling speech of blacks and whites alike. The river journey ended at New Orleans, where they passed two joyous days and nights and Samuel Thomas spent the best two dollars of his life for the pleasures of an octoroon girl with caramel skin and nipples dark as chocolate and a mouth like red fruit. It was said the city suffered from chronic afflictions of fire and flood and devastating storm, that it was notorious for yellow fever and murder and every sort of carnal delinquency. But Samuel Thomas fancied its bohemian character and exuberant wickedness, and he felt somehow more at home in his two days there than he’d ever felt in Portsmouth. He thought he might someday return to stay.
They shipped out on the steamship Alabama. His first view of the Gulf of Mexico was under a low morning sun that made an undulant gold of the water’s surface. He was struck by the dissimilarity of smell from the North Atlantic, the squalling gulls of different cry and character from those of New England. The pelicans were a novel entertainment—graceful on the wing, but in repose so like comical, jowly, big-bottomed bureaucrats. The ship steamed into the gulf under high billowing clouds of dazzling white, and the mainland shrank from view off the starboard.
The weather held well. They were four days on the placid sea before sighting the dark line of the Texas coast. They moored that evening off the shallows of Corpus Christi Bay, the army campfires on the beach glimmering like a fallen rain of stars. In the morning they debarked onto lighters and were ferried ashore. The ship’s crew had already told them much about this badland of winter northers sharp as razors and endless sweltering summers, about the hordes of insects and rattlesnakes, the scourge of cactus and thorny brush, the sand storms that could blind a man sure if he were not careful of his eyes. Considering that Taylor’s army had been here since the previous summer, the new men were surprised to find the camp in high spirits and a flurry of activity. Then learned that Taylor had only an hour earlier received orders to march down to the Rio Grande, Mexican objections be damned. War had not yet been declared, but its imminence could be felt in the camp’s excitement as the soldiers got ready to move out in the morning. “You’re a right lucky bunch to be going straight to the elephant and not spend more than one night in this shithole,” a red-eyed corporal told Samuel Thomas. “A right lucky bunch.”
They set out well before sunrise, off to “see the elephant,” the day’s expression for novel adventure. An hour into the march, in the gray light of dawn, Samuel Thomas got his first look at General Taylor, Old Rough and Ready himself, as he rode his white horse past the column. Craggy-faced, clad in a checkered shirt and coarse pants held up by suspenders, shod in brogans and wearing a tattered straw hat. “Looks like a damned farmer, don’t he?” said a grinning man marching next to Samuel Thomas. “But there aint no better general in the whole army.”
Day after day they marched from dawn to just before sundown, trekking through sun and wind and rain, through sandy flatland covered with mesquites and bramble and thorny scrub brush of all sorts. Three weeks after departing Corpus Christi they arrived at the Rio Grande. Taylor ordered construction to begin at once on a fort directly across from Matamoros and its garrison of Mexican lancers. He christened it Fort Texas, though one of his officers said they should call it Dogtown in deference to all the scrawny mutts at large in the vicinity. It would be two years yet before that raw riparian ground gave rise to the hamlet of Brownsville, but thus was Samuel Thomas the first of the Wolfes to set foot there.
He was there only a short time. On the march from Corpus Christi he had cultivated a hatred of the army far exceeding that of most enlisted men. The root of his antipathy had been planted at Fort Hamilton when he was caught dicing in the wagon shed with two other trainees. All the next day, under guard and in full view of the camp, the three of them were made to stand atop upright barrels on a layer of shattered bricks. It was a constant strain to maintain balance on the unsteady barrelheads, and each man several times fell to the broken brick. At sunset they were helped off the barrels, bruised and aching, bloody of knees and hands, and would be stiff-jointed for days. The punishment made Samuel Thomas resentful, but its severity paled in contrast to what he witnessed on the way to Fort Texas and during his time there. While he understood that severe offenses called for severe punishments, he was enraged by the stark cruelty of some of the penalties inflicted for minor infractions. It was one thing to flog a man bloody for sleeping on guard, quite another to lash him for failure to salute an officer. Or to brand him on the forehead with the “HD” of the habitual drunkard because he stood too tipsy at morning muster. A rifle laxly carried or a tunic improperly buttoned, a surly glance at an officer, an insufficient alacrity in obeying a command—and a soldier could find himself straddling a sawhorse for hours with his hands tied behind him and weights attached to his ankles. Or lugging a ball and chain for a week. Or wearing a heavy iron collar affixed with spokes that made it impossible to lay his head down for sleep. Or passing a few hours sitting bucked and gagged on the ground—immobilized with his knees drawn up and his arms bound around them and a stout stick set crosswise under the knees and over the arms.
In an army whose officers were largely nativist and Protestant, it was only natural that the most maltreated in the ranks were Irishmen, three of whom—Jack Riley, John Little, and Lucas Malone—Samuel had become friends with during the southward march. Though he had no giveaway accent, he had at once been taken for Irish by Riley, and he admitted to an Irish grandfather. In keeping daily company with these men, Samuel Thomas began to assume a mild brogue, though he was unaware of it until they were almost to the Rio Grande and Lucas Malone said, “Listen to this lad, willya? Bedamn if he’s not sounding like he was weaned in County Cork.”
Malone and John Little hated the army with even greater fervor than Samuel Thomas did. Both of them had been punished harshly numerous times, for one offense or another. Both had undergone the buck and gag, and Little had once worn the spiked collar, and Malone had taken a ride on the sawhorse on their first day at the Rio Grande. And though he’d never yet been physically punished, Jack Riley was no less galled than either of them. He had served almost ten years in the British army and earned a sergeant’s stripes even in the face of English bigotry, then had mustered out and migrated to America and joined the Yankee ranks, confident that his military experience would soon win him another sergeancy as well as the respect denied him in Her Majesty’s service. But he found the Irish were as much scorned by the Yanks as by John Bull, and in the six months since his American enlistment he had grown convinced he would never become a sergeant. As a man of sizable self-esteem, it enraged him to be rebuked by college-boy officers not half the soldier he was. The injury to his pride cut deep as a whip.
They had been on the Rio Grande four days when the corporal in charge of Samuel Thomas’s labor detail shot a nearby dog for no reason but boredom. The gut-wounded animal screamed and ran a short distance and fell down but kept trying to run, yowling and turning in a tight circle on the blood-muddying ground for an interminable half minute before John Little drove a pick through its head to end its misery. The corporal was recharging his pistol and didn’t notice Samuel Thomas stalking toward him until too late to avoid the punch that knocked him sprawling with two dislodged teeth. It was Samuel Thomas’s intention to kick the man to death but before he could commence he was subdued by others, including Malone, who hissed into his ear, “Hold enough, lad! Put the boot to him and you’ll be fucked most truly.”