He held up the dripping mask. “All set to scare the kiddies with.”
The other volunteers were laughing and clapping each other on the backs. Why, it was the damn funniest thing they’d ever seen. Leave it to Cobb to come up with something like that. Just when you thought he’d exhausted his grisly creativity by using the scrotum of a Mex for a tobacco pouch or making a necklace of fingers… he came up with something new.
Pulling their knives, the others began doing it, too.
Cobb walked amongst them, motioning with his bloody knife like a schoolteacher instructing on the finer points of conjugating verbs. Except, Cobb’s classroom was a hot, wind-blown place and his subject was butchering. He made quite a figure standing there in his filthy, threadbare buckskins, forage cap tilted at a rakish angle atop his head. His beard was long and shaggy, his hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy knots. An assortment of Colt pistols, revolvers, knifes, and hatchets hung from his belts. Along with the newly-acquired Mexican death mask and the mummified hand of a priest he’d hacked off in Monterrey and sun-dried on a flat rock.
There weren’t enough bodies to go around and there was some argument as to who was going to get what. Cobb settled that by telling the men it was strictly first come, first served. Those of you who got here first, why ye just carve yerself a face, that’s what ye want, he told them. Ye others, well ye have to make do with what ye can beg, borrow, or steal. Cobb told them-and they believed him-that there would be plenty of trophies to be had down the road a piece. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today.
“One thing ye can count on, boys,” he said to them, “is that there’s always gonna be more. Mexico’s just full of ’em.”
He watched them going to work, hacking and sawing and cutting, singing little ditties they’d learned from the Mexican folk, but didn’t understand a word of.
Yes, Cobb watched them, knowing they’d patterned themselves after him. He’d joined up as an enlisted man, but soon enough-maybe through ferocity in battle or sheer savagery-he’d become an officer and their leader. They looked up to him. They fancied all the badges and military decorations he’d taken off dead Mexican officers and pinned to his hide shirt. The necklaces of fingers and blackened ears, the skull of the that Mexican colonel he’d mounted from his saddlehorn.
They wanted to be like him.
They wanted to be a bloodthirsty hard-charger like James Lee Cobb. They wanted to leap into battle as he had at Buena Vista, shooting and stabbing and pounding his way through the Mexican ranks.
It made them fight real hard in battle so they could collect up trophies as he had.
And, yes, they could fight hard and die hard and loot and mutilate the dead all they wanted… but none of them would ever be like James Lee Cobb. They would never have his peculiar appetite for inflicting suffering and death. An appetite born in nameless places where human bones were piled in pyramids and human souls were boiled in cauldrons. They would never have that and they surely would never have the birthmark he had.
The one that looked like a red four-fingered handprint.
A handprint that positively burned when death was near.
What happened at the Battle of Buena Vista was this: Some 14,000 Mexican troops commanded by General Santa Anna charged Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces which numbered less than 5,000. Through determination, audacity, and sheer luck, the American’s pushed the Mexican’s back.
Easy enough to tell; not so easy to experience.
On a dismal morning in February 1847, the troopers under Taylor received orders to strike their tents and march on Buena Vista. Sixteen miles later, they arrived… lacking provisions, wood for fires. Early the next morning picket guards arrived, saying that a large Mexican force was approaching and approaching fast. James Lee Cobb and the Missouri volunteers stationed themselves in a narrow ridge, just beyond an artillery battery and waited for their enemies.
Along with them, were elements of the Kentucky and Arkansas cavalry. Each man waited amongst the rocks, eyes wide, flintlock muskets and carbines primed and at the ready, knives sharpened and hatchets in hand. There was a stink in the air-sour, high, heady.
The smell of fear.
For down below, the enemy were massing and everyone spread out on that ridge could see them, really see them for the first time. The sheer numbers. For once, intelligence had neither over-inflated or under-inflated enemy strength. The Mexicans moved and marched, formed-up into ranks and scattered out in skirmish lines. From where Cobb sat… they were mulling, busy things in perpetual motion.
“Don’t look out there and see yer death, boys,” Cobb told his volunteers. “Look down there and know, know that if they take ye, yer gonna take ten of them motherfuckers with ye.”
Cannonade exploded along the face of the mountain as the Mexican guns-eight-pounders and sixteen-pounders-sought them out. By nightfall, they picked up the pace, raining hell down upon two Indiana rifle companies. Bugles sounded and men died and gouts of smoke filled the air… but the real fighting had yet to begin.
The volunteers and regular army forces waited and waited. Hungry, cold, but not daring to close their eyes as discharges of grapeshot tore up the landscape around them.
At dawn the next day, the Mexican cannons started singing again and things really started moving. Heavy fire erupted in and around the volunteers and was answered by American batteries. The entire mountainside was crawling with the enemy like hordes of Hun filled with blood-rage and steel, preparing to sack a town.
Cobb moved his troops out and charged a hidden Mexican emplacement that had been harassing the Indiana rifles, killing the soldiers and hacking on them until they lay scattered in pieces amongst their damaged guns.
But for every ten killed, twenty more came shouting up the hill at them. And behind them, Jesus, half the Mexican army. Infantry in their green tunics, cavalry in scarlet coats. They carried British East India rifles and long lances, wore brass helmets with large black plumes like raven’s feathers.
All hell broke loose.
Cannon balls whistled over the heads of the volunteers, exploding with gouts of shattered rock and flying dirt. Grapeshot ripped into men, spraying their anatomies in every which direction. Smoke hung like a ground fog over everything and the cavalry looked like ghost riders pounding through it. Men were screaming and shrieking, blood covered the ground in viscous, steaming pools. Soldiers-both American and Mexican-dropped and died, piling up like corded lumber. Some rose only to fall again and be crushed under the thundering hooves of horses. Bugles sounded out. Men crawled through the carnage, missing limbs and/or pressing their viscera back into ruptured abdomens. Some wanted to escape… but others, piecemeal, wanted to fight on.
Cobb bayoneted a soldier and slashed the face off another. He saw volunteers fall… but each time he advanced to their aid, bodies fell at his feet, blood and brains spattered into his face, enemy soldiers rushing out at him.
So he busied himself shooting and knifing, taking them as they came.
And around him, the volunteers scrambled over heaped bodies as mounted troopers of the Mississippi Rifles charged into the fray. They wore bright red shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. The Mexican cavalry met them on deadly ground and muskets sounded and sabers slashed, horses were ripped apart by cannon balls and men fell by the hundreds, the landscape becoming a bleeding, blasted sea of bodies and limbs and glistening internals.
Behind the Mexican cavalry, a body of lancers came shouting and running, infantry with fixed bayonets backing them up.
The Missouri volunteers, many of them burnt black with powder, fought on, ready to take anything that came. Cobb emptied his pistols until they were smoking and hot. He fired his musket, loaded, rammed, fired again with swift expertise. But the Mexicans poured forward in a surging, shrieking tide, severing the American lines, and Cobb found himself crushing skulls with the butt of his rifle, opening bellies and throats with his knives, and taking weapons off dead men, fighting and fighting.