Bad Apple

by Lancaster Hill

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Many men fought—and many men died—in the Texas Revolution of 1836. This is the story of John Apple. A man who not only fought in the battle of the Alamo, he lived to avenge it . . .

The Road to the Alamo

John Apple is a simple man. A gardener and preacher who lives a quiet life in Ohio. Then a broken heart sends him south. A chance encounter with a very drunk Jim Bowie leads him to join the Texian Army. And the struggle for independence from the brutalities of Mexican President Santa Ana teaches Apple a valuable new skill: Killing. Working with Bowie, Sam Houston, Stephen Austin and their ragtag army, Apple becomes a secret courier and bloody advocate for the cause. As a calling card, he plants apple seeds in the chests of every soldier he slays—and sparks fear in the hearts of Santa Ana's men.

But nothing could prepare him for the fate that awaited them at the Alamo Mission. Nothing could save his brothers in arms from the devastating slaughter that would go down in history. And now, for John Apple, nothing would be sweeter than revenge . . .

Release date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

For half the year, the hills and the farms are easy. The two fingers of the Mohican River were touched by God with fertility, as surely and whole hog as the rambunctious Adam and Eve. The town that grew there was just as fecund, producing farms and businesses and population with rapidity that at first intrigued the local red men, then perplexed and alarmed them.

I got there in 1832. I was in my fifties, then, and a little less patient than I had been in my youth. No, maybe that’s not the word. I was patient to watch things grow. I was unforgiving—that’s a better word—unforgiving for things that grew bad. I could nurse blight or bugs from my plants but that was a natural, God-created competition. What people do is rarely that.

Where I lived before, in Warren, Pennsylvania, was showing signs of smoky, noisy blight. Too many forges, too many mills, too much hammering, too many people hollering to be heard, too many horses complaining, too many cartwheels turning, too many youngsters shouting and crying and getting yelled at.

Too much civilization.

I worked on a sheep and goat farm nigh the Allegheny River and wasn’t attached to a thing but the earth. I would always stay out until sunset and took that moment to look west and admire what remained of the uncorrupted work of God. I would go to my shack, then, and read the Good Book by the failing light before joining my employers, the elderly Brandons, for supper in the main house. It was over apple pie one night that I announced my intention to leave. I hadn’t planned to say that, hadn’t even planned to go; it just, suddenly, felt right. I waited till a replacement could be found and set out on a spring morning, at dawn, with just a rifle, my Bible, and a grain sack generously filled with produce I had grown.

It took me about six months to arrive at where I didn’t even know I was headed. I was meandering west and Mansfield got in the way. I planted myself there for two reasons. First: the soil was so rich I wept when I touched it. I swear, if there were seeds, those tears would have grown them. It was like God had sent me a vision instructing me to work this land. Second: that good earth was the only sign of God in the region. Oh, people had dutifully built two churches, but few parishioners passed through their doors and the parsons lacked enthusiasm. One of them told me he had agreed to this sinecure just to be close to Pittsburgh for when some aged clergyman there hung up his frock.

“I want to be in a real city,” he told me, “with real sin.”

I was not sure how the padre meant that, but I decided to trust the calling and not the man.

With more faith than planning, I elected to use what money I’d saved to buy a small plot, plant my own fruits and vegetables, and use the unsteady old barn for Bible meetings.

I did not grow up prayerful. I was born and raised on a small farm in Massachusetts before, during, and after the War for Independence. We were the people who constantly broke the king’s peace, and we suffered the first and enduring wrath of the Redcoats. Floggings, hangings, deprivation of goods and services. I learned to shoot at a young age—at game, since my pa was off fighting. I learned to work the land. When the war ended and pa didn’t come back, me and my younger brother Nathaniel stayed on till my ma went too. From sadness, I believe. She was the one who had turned to the Holy Book and found solace in its lessons. I often sat by her as she read, more for her comfort than mine. She taught me reading and soon I was reading to her—right up till the end.

Nathaniel apprenticed with a granite-carver—he had the stocky build and arms for it—but I did not want to stay. The spirit of freedom smelled too much like blood. It still does, only then—well, then I was younger and thought a new place would clean it from my nostrils. I picked and hunted my way through New York and into Pennsylvania. I read verse by the light of many a campfire. I felt the presence of God Himself under the million eyes of night—the stars above and the lesser ones lurking in the shadows, “all kinds of living creatures” that were created amidst the innocent coming of the world. I stopped in Warren, partly to share my faith but also to put my hands in soil again, to make things grow. When the choke of man became too great, I departed.

You know of my reaching Mansfield, about me growing food outside the barn and over the next two years, one by one, then two by two, and eventually in groups of ten or twelve growing souls inside the barn. They grew me too, a community of loving souls as surely my God had intended. Eventually, I fell hard in love with a member of the flock: Mrs. Astoria Laveau, a New Orleans–born widow who used her inheritance to found and run a library.

I knew how to read, but it was there, from her, that I learned how to read. How to understand what was in the mind of the writer, why words were chosen just so, why some writers described everything in detail and while others did not. Why some stories were told by narrators and others were not. A world opened for me, and with it, my heart opened, too.

Everyone, if they’re lucky, has love. She was deeply mine. She was spiritual. She had all those many books—not a day went by that I did not learn from her. She was worldly and desirable, yet we did not cross into sin. Not that I did not desire it. I went to kiss her, one time after a springtime walk, but she bowed her forehead to me. It was love-made-chaste . . . at least, for me. Alas, when I finally summoned the gumption to propose an official courtship, I was spurned. Astoria said she loved me as a preacher, as a friend, as that accursed word “brother,” but not as a man. I learned that at the same time I was considering betrothal she had feelings for another man, a blacksmith. It was just gossip, whispers, until they came to a dance together and I saw how affectionate she could be within the bounds of public decency. My heart stopped beating for anything but getting away.

I left carrying what I had left Massachusetts with. It was nearly winter, last winter, and at my age and lack of girth, it meant the only direction I could plausibly head was south.

Working so much in gardens, I had taken to not wearing shoes much. Even when I went south, I preferred to toughen my soles with pinecones and walk like God made His animals to walk, feeling the earth beneath them. As a result, I could feel rocks and sticks and adjust my balance quickly before they knocked or cracked. I made a very, very quiet scout.

I reached Texas in April, intending to make my way to the Gulf. I knew nothing about life on the sea, or boats, and that experience seemed worth having. I had heard there was arable land year-round and that appealed to me. I came to a saloon like this one morning only to discover that I had strayed a little west. I was in San Antonio de Béxar. On the way into the establishment I had stepped over a body on the wooden sidewalk. On the way out, after assuring myself he was alive, I picked him up and put him on a bench nearby. His arms fussed and fluttered about and his hand landed on the white bone hilt of a long, sharp blade. He slashed blindly in front of him, forcing me to stumble back off the walk.

He was a foul and inhuman sight, grizzled and unkempt like a starving bear that had pawed down the clothes of a scarecrow and crawled in. The clothes were a soiled double-breasted blue coat, presently unbuttoned; a white shirt, also soiled; gray trousers, likewise stained; and riding boots with the spurs still affixed. They jangled, like little fits of laughter, each time he swung the blade.

The man stopped slashing when he ran out of startlement. He opened his eyes and found himself blinded by the sun. He slapped his free hand over his face and slumped back. The knife hand flopped to his knee, stabbing the wooden bench.

“Where am I?” he asked from under his palm.

I looked up at the name of the place. “The Friendly Ace,” I said. I guessed, at night, there was gaming in addition to drink.

“Good,” the man said. “I got a meeting here in the morning.” He hesitated. “It’s still morning, yeah?” Then he answered his own question by cracking his fingers. “Sun says about ten.”

“It’s ten,” I informed him.

“Did—did I just attack you?” the man asked.

“You swung your blade around a bit,” I told him.

“Just the flight of a startled hornet,” he said. From his subdued tone that was apparently supposed to be an apology.

The man lowered his hand, slumped back, exhaled. “Christ, I hate this life.”

He could have meant drink or his personal existence in general. I wasn’t curious enough to find out. I turned to go back to the large mule I’d bought in Oklahoma. Even with shoe leather, which I had on now, a man was at risk in these lowlands from rattlers and scorpions.

“Mister!” the man on the bench called after me.

I turned back. “Sir?”

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

That was how I met Jim Bowie and also James Fannin, who the meeting after breakfast was with. I was invited by Bowie to remain. He was just two years younger than me, and we had gotten along like old dogs. We had a lot of the same kinds of experience only in different places—him living off the land in Kentucky and Louisiana, before he veered off into fighting for a living. I learned that passing out drunk was a practice of two years standing. In 1833, he had moved his family from San Antonio de Béxar to distant Monclova, Mexico, to escape a spreading cholera epidemic. But Monclova was where the disease hit, resulting in his pregnant wife Maria, their daughter, and Maria’s parents all dying.

The way he told the story was a form of penance, it seemed, or maybe self-flagellation, making himself hear, again, what his actions had cost. I didn’t try to console him with Scripture, I didn’t share my own pale story of lost love, and I assuredly did not judge him. I just folded my hands under my chin and prayed in silence. He must have known I was praying for the Bowie ladies. When I finished, he thanked me. Some of the cloud from his storytelling seemed to pass. Maybe for good, I hoped.

Then Fannin strode down the stairs of the three-story hotel-eatery. The officer had arrived the night before, by boat and horse from New Orleans. That was where Stephen Austin was living. He had gone there to escape the reach of the Mexican government, which had already arrested him for inciting violence.

I had heard of Bowie but not the others. Austin, I learned, was right betwixt Bowie and me age-wise. But this Fannin—he was a peach-faced boy of barely thirty. He talked like a man, but he walked and dressed and ate as proper as a cadet. Which he had been, I discovered, at West Point, so maybe that explained it.

After Bowie assured the pup that I was “a saintly square fellah,” I learned that the short of things was, Austin wanted firsthand reports from Nuevo Mexico. He wanted to know which side the Mexicans there would fall if Texas revolted. All he was getting were second- and thirdhand stories from Mexicans and Indians, relayed by Texians, that the locals would side with anyone who opposed Santa Anna.

“We’ve heard that the generalissimo is attacking his own people, conducting executions without trial,” Fannin said. “We need trained personnel to infiltrate and ascertain the facts of the matter.”

To which Bowie replied, “If you mean you want to go down and find out the truth, Fannin, just plain say so.”

“He did,” I told Bowie, seeing a means to endear myself to one who still seemed wary of one “spiritually square.”

That was how I got invited to go south with the Jim and the James.

I swapped my trusted mule for a less sturdy horse, which Bowie traded for a more endurance-minded one. He was canny. He knew the horse trader and, more important, the horse trader knew Jim Bowie. The man made the exchange without even being asked—he was just looked at a little dark-eyed.

Texas had not been what I imagined from books and newspapers. Yes, it was flat and scrubby lowland in many spots, but there were also green hills and active, clean rivers, all manner of bird and plant, and some of the bluest skies I have ever been under. I was sorry to be pulled off my course, since I really wanted to feel the misty cool of a gulf morning on that shore, something I’d read about in a diary donated to my widow-lady’s library. If I could’ve managed the extra encumbrance, I would’ve stolen it from her shelf. The script was legible and the words were written by a man of quality. That realization grew as the three of us set out to reconnoiter for Mr. Austin. It’s a good thing Bowie was with us, because there were times when my mind went roving among the beauty. Not him. He didn’t look alert, but he had a sense about things. That’s why he rode point. Fannin was a few paces behind, listening to whatever might come from the rear.

Fannin was a bit of a fop, but he wasn’t a slouch. Along the early evening of the first day, he stopped, doubled back a little, and listened. He reported to Bowie that he heard something on our tail. He said he couldn’t see anything but a rolling dust cloud—which, to him, meant one of two things.

“It’s a dust storm or a complement of horses,” Fannin said.

“Wild herd?” Bowie asked.

“Not in that kind of straight line south,” Fannin answered.

We rode all through the night to put distance between it and us. Bowie knew the country well, kept us on flat land where neither Indians nor cats were likely to find us.

The second day out there was no longer a cloud. Either the storm had died or the horses had cut off in another direction. We rested, partly from being tired, partly because the sun was hot as an oven. It was late afternoon when we started up again, and quickly got the firsthand evidence that Austin wanted.

There was a party of six or seven families moving west, most on foot, some of the ladies on burros. They were worn out and, through Bowie, they explained that they were fleeing soldados who were going village to village in search of folks who weren’t happy with Santa Anna. That would’ve cut a pretty wide swath through the population, since if you were hungry or poor or sick or infested with bugs inside and out—and most of them were all of these—the soldiers took that as meaning they disapproved of the generalissimo . Just being discontented got them whipped, jailed, or hanged. These particular families, along with others, went north, south, or east from Gonzales, which Bowie told us was about two days’ ride east.

“Could be where those horses headed,” Fannin said.

According to these haggard few, that left the town populated by eighteen men and a cannon. That was it.

Wishing the families buenas tardes—and meaning it—Bowie headed us off in the direction of the city. We didn’t know it then, but we were about to stumble into the start of the Texian Revolution. All I did know, for sure, was at least I was going in the right direction if I still wanted to get to the gulf.

We got there to find a nasty little mess in the making. The hour was near sundown and we saw campfires on the horizon, so we slowed. Bowie left us behind with his horse and stalked up close. He came back pretty quick.

“At least a hundred federales,” he said, using what I later learned was a term of disparagement for Mexican officers who killed to enforce Santa Anna’s peace. “They’re camped about a half-mile outside the town.”

Now, Gonzales wasn’t very big and it wasn’t very old. You probably know that. The town moved around a bit to stay out of the way of hostile Indians but finally got surveyed and planted in 1827. Those redskins were the reason the Texians possessed what the Mexican dragoons had been sent to recover: a small, bronze swivel cannon that had been given to them for protection. If the locals were going to be in rebellion, the man in charge of the Mexican military thereabout did not want them to continue possessing it.

First, Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea had asked nicely. The answer he got back was what the ancient Spartans told the oppressor Xerxes: moln labé.

Come and take it.

“So that’s what the soldier men from the south plan to do,” Bowie finished his recitation.

“Let’s go wide around,” Fannin suggested. “Those defenders can probably use three more able bodies.”

We didn’t rest that night. Instead, we picked our way through grassy lowlands that lay between a pair of wooded regions. Bowie was once again in the lead. How he knew where to step, I don’t know. He seemed to sense where there were furrows and toppled trees and predators; I couldn’t see past the mane of my fine mount, nor smell anything but its sweat. Until, that is, we had gone some distance. Exactly how much distance I couldn’t tell you, because it wasn’t a straight line. But after a time there was a strong odor of defiance. That has a smell, you better believe. It’s partly men, it’s partly a wild mix of fur or cotton or whatever they’ve been wearing for weeks, it’s partly cooked food and human waste hanging in the dark of that spot where defiance is rooted.

There were no torches, just in case Mexican shooters had it in mind to pick men off. So we dismounted and set a good distance away so we wouldn’t be shot at by either side. Come dawn, which shined its full light on our eastward-facing selves, we rode into a sack of men and their cannon.

The gun was a sight. Two big wooden wheels and a tiny tube stuck between them, like a chipmunk peeking between two boulders. It was pointed backward, toward the encampment, for reasons that were not then evident to me. The men around them seemed built of stronger metals—tall, upright, armed, and watching the west. We saw them see us, but they were watching somewhere else: ahead. A man was running hell-bent toward them.

“They’re mounting!” he yelled when he was close enough to be heard. “’Bout thirty of ’em!”

One man in the front of the group gave orders to what looked like seventy, eighty men to his rear.

“Do not shoot unless shot at!” he yelled.

Then, turning in our direction, he motioned us over.

“You with us?” he put it to us bluntly.

“Jim Bowie is with you,” our companion said.

“And James Fannin,” added the other, though it wasn’t needed.

The leader was not impolite to Fannin but he had his mind full of something else. He saluted the man with the big knife sheathed to his hip and nodded at us but gave us no orders. He must’ve known Bowie would know what to do. He left to see to the deployment.

We rode around the back of the line so as not to interfere and, I figured, so we could see where we’d best fit in. There were women and children well to the rear, those who didn’t leave—as Texian women are not ones to stand down in the face of anything that isn’t nature-sent. And even then, it has to be a helluva blow. We dismounted, tied our horses to a tree since there wasn’t time to lead them to the corral way back. The leader did not seem to want a cavalry charge. Maybe they hadn’t drilled enough together. Men were apparently coming in daily to support the cause of defying Mexico.

Bowie took us to a spot behind what was turning out to be two lines of men, twenty or so each. The rest dropped back into reserve. He was closer to the fighting men than the reinforcements, signaling his preference. He got it. The leader put us at the end, Bowie up front, Fannin and me behind.

I later learned that this striding, restless man was Captain Mathew Caldwell, “Old Paint” as he was called by those who knew him. I put him at about forty plus a whisker. Turns out he had a nice house back in town—which was some ways away—and a wife, Miss Hannah, who was somewhere at the tent that had been set up as a hospital in case things got ugly. And since, just days before, the men of Gonzales had voted to go to war against the dragoons and the nation they served, no one was expecting a sudden breakout of peace. Behind him, always at the ready, was his backwoods right arm, a crack shot by the name of Willie Miller.

Then the thirty men appeared. They just waited in a column, not a line. The new sun glinting off the buttons of the man at point, they waited a lot of time until a spread of dust rose behind them—

The rest of the Mexican troops.

John’s long fingernail had drawn a straight line on my bar top. Closer to him he drew another straight line going the other way. To me, it looked like a “T.” Those were meant to represent, I suspected, the two facing armies. To the generals in Mexico and probably to Steve Austin, this was also how it would have looked. But to John they were lines of men, some of whom would soon be mulch for plants and trees.

“You know what war is?”

The man’s question was a sudden stop in his narrative. Once again, the swinging pendulum of the clock was the only sound. Funny thing. I had come west because, growing up on the port of New York City with its constant noise, I wanted—not quiet, exactly, because I’d buried too many relatives in my big Lithuanian fami. . .