A Ballad of Love and Glory(53)
In the afternoon, however, Maloney returned from the cathedral with devastating news.
“Och, acushla. The Yanks have taken Independence Hill and the Bishop’s Palace. General Ampudia best be retakin’ that western position as soon as possible. It commands the whole city. Now that the palace has fallen, what’s to stop the Yankees?”
“They will be stopped,” Ximena said.
In the evening, when the firing ceased and they went out with a cart to collect the wounded, Ximena saw the Yanqui flag flying over the Bishop’s Palace and shivered. She didn’t want to think about what that meant. Instead, she focused on not slipping on the pools of blood and splattered brains as she walked over the mangled soldiers strewn on the streets, some with their hearts or entrails exposed. It was a field of carnage. Limbs scattered about, heads without bodies, bodies without legs or arms, eyes hanging from their sockets. Crushed bones crunched under her feet. Flies swarmed in black clouds. Stray dogs fought over severed limbs. The soldiers who writhed and howled in agony didn’t frighten her. The ones who filled her with dread were those who lay on the cold ground gazing serenely at her as life seeped from their eyes and their ghastly wounds. They had resigned themselves to their unhappy fate and seemed to welcome their approaching death with an appalling calmness. By now, she had learned to let them be, to ignore the impulse to help them.
The dead had different expressions on their countenance, some smiling, others full of defiance, some placid, others frozen in rage. “Please, a drink of water!” the Yanqui soldiers cried as they clutched at her skirt. “?Agua, por favor!” her countrymen wailed. She lowered the water gourd she carried over her shoulders and tended to both friend and foe alike.
She heard a wail of despair different from the others and turned to see a group of soldaderas searching the rubble. One of them was bending over her dead husband, yelling his name. As Ximena was about to go comfort her, the soldadera picked up her husband’s musket and rushed down the street to where the Yanquis congregated, screaming something in her indigenous tongue. Musket fire was heard from where she disappeared, and everyone rushed to take cover. Had she been shot down? Or had she shot someone?
“You oughtn’t be here,” Maloney said as they hid behind the wagon. He patted her shoulder. “Go back to the hospital. Leave the gatherin’ to me and the others.”
Ximena shook her head. “I’m fine.”
She looked at the citadel in the distance. It was silent now, and she wished John would come to the city so she could see for herself that he was alive. His absence these past few days had made her heart fold up its petals like a tulip on a rainy day. It was wrong, she knew. He was not hers to long for, and it was an insult to Joaquín’s memory. But she had lost everyone she loved, and at times she felt there was no reason to carry on. It was only when the Irishman looked at her with the desire he tried so hard to deny, and her heart awakened, unfurling in the heat of his gaze, that she remembered she was still alive.
“Is it frettin’ yourself after him, you are?” Maloney asked. “The big fella can mind himself right enough. And up in the citadel, he’s safer than we are here below.”
“Is he angry… angry with me?”
“No, jewel. He’s cross with himself, he is.” He patted her hand in understanding. Looking back at the street, he frowned and said, “Wait here, lass.” He stepped over the bodies strewn along the street until he stood before a Yanqui soldier leaning against the wall of a house. “Begorra! If ’tisn’t Kerr Delaney himself!” Bending down to touch the soldier, he let out a yelp when the soldier opened his eyes and asked for water.
“He’s alive! Quick, give me a hand, lassie.”
“Faith! Is that you, ould rascal?” the soldier said. “Heard ya went over to the other side.”
“Aye, I sure did. Don’t talk now, Kerr, a chara. Let me tend to ya first.”
After they loaded him onto the wagon and were walking back to the hospital, Maloney told Ximena about his friend. “He was in the hospital tent with me when the Yankees did this,” he said, touching the HD on his forehead. “When he recovers, he’ll join our side, he will.”
“I hope it is so,” she said.
When they got back, she and Maloney took care of the soldier, who was weakened from the loss of blood. A musket ball had pierced his thigh, but it had a clean exit and there had been no major injury to the muscle. “Och, you’re one lucky Irishman!” Maloney said, giving his friend a sip of mezcal from his flask.
Ximena turned to leave so that they could chat while she tended to the other men, glad to see Maloney laughing again.
“Don’t go, lassie, come listen to this story. Riley is goin’ to get a good laugh when he hears this.”
Delaney was a big, hairy man, his bushy beard as red as terracotta tiles. After Maloney presented her to him, Ximena listened to his story. He said that two nights before, while camping out at the pecan grove near the city, he and his comrades had sneaked into Captain Bragg’s tent while the man was sound asleep. Ximena remembered that John and Maloney hated this man.
“We thought we’d have ourselves a bit of a bonfire, so we lit the fuse of an artillery shell,” Delaney said. “We rolled it through the flap of Bragg’s tent and ran away.”
“Now, I know you didn’t get him because I just saw the rascal firin’ his guns upon the city,” Maloney said, laughing. “But ma bouchal, tell us what happened next.”