Crossers by Philip Caputo Page B

take whatever we needed—guns from the garrisons, food and liquor from the haciendas or from the stores in a town—the stores that was owned by Spaniards or folks loyal to Díaz. In the end, the battalion could muster around three hundred men—and a few women, too, soldaderas like Ynez, gals with big gold earrings and bandoliers crissy-crossed on their hefty bosoms.
Oh Lord, the things we done, the things we seen! Every now and then we’d come across hanged men swinging from cottonwoods, the bodies dried up and blackened, like scarecrows, but they didn’t all scare the crows. One time we saw three fellas a-swinging from a tree in the distance, and as we got closer, Ben said, “They’re still alive,” on account of they was moving around. When we got closer still, we seen that it was ravens doing the moving, covered the bodies head to boot, looked like they was dressed in black feathers with all those ravens hanging on to ’em and pecking out bits and pieces. And I never will forget seeing a coyote cross our path with what looked like a broken tree branch in its jaws and it turned out to be a human arm. These are gruesome things to tell, but that’s the way it was. Not much glory in it, and as far as the gold went, Ben and me still had the same Yankee dollars we rode in with, and not a lot of those neither. Soldiers of fortune with no fortune, that was us.
You know, seeing and doing the things we done made me harder, and I reckon Ben got even harder than when he started off. But Ynez got softer, strange to say. She fought like hell when there was fighting to be done, but there wasn’t no more of that other stuff. She’d come to be longer on mercy than on justice. After one of those battles, the mad went out of her sad-mad look. Ynez come up to me and said, “Babcock, I have done terrible things.” And I said that all of us had, but it was like she didn’t hear me. “For the love of my husband, I have condemned my soul to hell.” This was real Mexican kind of talk. But she went to a padre in one pueblo while he was burying dead folks and confessed her sins. That rattlesnake woman had done defanged herself, all that vengeance poison was gone out of her. By her lights, her soul done been cleansed of murder and she aimed to keep it that way.
Thinking back on those times, there’s two stories about Ben that stick in my mind. First off, he got promoted to captain. This is how it happened. One night after we’d routed federals from a railroad depot, he woke me up with the toe of his boot. “T.J., something’s wrong,” he said in a real low voice. I looked around and saw our men asleep, and all I heard was a little crackling from the dying campfires and snoring and the sound of a rock or two getting kicked by the picketed horses as they moved about. “Ain’t nothing wrong,” I told Ben, but he insisted there was, said he could feel there was some danger out there. Now, there is something I didn’t tell you about Ben. He claimed to have supernatural powers. Said it ran in the family. Some grandmother or auntie of his could talk to the spirits of dead people, and when he was a kid in school, he wrote down a date in his copybook for no reason—a date that was a couple of months in the future. Well, when that date come around, the grandmother or auntie who had conversations with the departed died herself. Even though I wasn’t a scientific fella, I did not believe in that spooky stuff. Anyway, I told Ben that if he was so all-fired sure something was wrong, he’d best wake up Ynez and tell her, which is what he done. Ynez had pretty much the same reaction as me, but once an idea got into Ben’s head you could not pry it out with a crowbar, and he saddled up his horse and rode out.
Wasn’t five minutes later I heard a gunshot and jumped out of my bedroll. The whole company was awake now. There came a regular fusillade and Ben galloping back shouting like that Paul Revere fella that the federals were right