After the Bugles: A Story of the Buckalew Family - Softcover

Elmer Kelton (1926-2009) was the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men's Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years, and served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009.

I
The bodies would lie there till they went to dust, for Santa Anna had lost the battle. And with the battle, he had lost the war.
His saber-cut arm resting in a loose sling, Joshua Buckalew silently waited while his horse was being saddled. His sober gaze drifted across the still and somber San Jacinto battlefield, where score upon score of lifeless Mexican soldiers lay crumpled on the ground or bogged in black mud or floating in the reedy marshes of Buffalo Bayou. Two days ago a swaggering Santa Anna had gone into his tent for siesta, confident that he held victory in his hands, for he had a ragged rabble of hungry Texans backed against the bayou. He awakened in panic to find the sodden plain slashed by musket and rifle and cannonfire, his red flag trampled by desperate men whose voices clamored in fury above the thunder of the guns: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”
Now it was over. The war was won. A victorious army had repaired to its camp at the edge of the plain, shouting for the blood of the captured Napoleon of the West. Big Sam Houston, nursing a shattered ankle, grimly refused to let them have him. Dead men write no treaties, he declared. And Texas would have her treaty of independence.
Home. The exultation had faded now in the barren stillness of the battlefield, and the Texans thought of home. A bitter taste lay sharp in Joshua Buckalew’s mouth, for he knew his home lay in ashes. What the retreating Texans hadn’t burned, the Mexican army had. He gazed westward, his mind reaching far beyond what his pain-pinched eyes could see. He knew the desolation that waited there: the gutted homes, the burned-out towns, the unmarked graves scattered from here to the Rio Bravo. The land itself still lay there, neglected but otherwise unchanged by the war, still possessed of the elusive promise that had drawn Americans by the thousands into Mexican-owned Texas to colonize under the laws of Mexico. Yes, the land remained, but everything else would have to be built back again with sweat and blood and determination. After all those hard years of work and privation and gradual accomplishment—years that had drifted away in smoke—Joshua Buckalew wondered if he still had it in him.
Times, winning the war is only the beginning of the battle. After the bugles fall silent, there is always the long road back.
Short, shaggy-haired Muley Dodd finished saddling Buckalew’s horse and looked worriedly at the sling. “Josh, you reckon maybe we ain’t rushin’ a mite? You’d travel better if that arm wasn’t so angry-lookin’.”
Joshua Buckalew had been standing hunched in unconscious deference to the throbbing arm. Now he drew himself to his full five-feet-eleven. “It’ll heal as good on horseback as here in this cursed swamp. I’ve seen enough of San Jacinto to last me a lifetime.”
There was another reason to be moving on. He looked gravely at Ramón Hernandez, who finished lashing a blanket-wrapped bundle across the back of a captured Mexican packhorse. Beneath that blanket lay the body of Antonio Hernandez. “Ramón wants to bury his brother at home. If the weather turns warm, we got no time to waste.”
* * *
In the early 1830’s, Joshua Buckalew and his older brother Thomas had come to Texas from Tennessee to try to build a home in Stephen F. Austin’s new land. They had drifted west and west and west, until at last they found what they wanted far beyond San Felipe de Austin, beyond even the Colorado River, near the Mexican colony where the Hernandez family squeezed a living out of the raw frontier by plowing their fields and raising cattle and catching wild horses. The Buckalews, copying the pattern, farmed some and branded wild cattle and broke mustangs to trade for supplies and now and again a handful of hard money in the eastern settlements. It had been a primitive life, in the main. But the Buckalews by their nature had been west-moving men, ever since Grandpa had frozen his feet that winter with George Washington.
Then had come Santa Anna, bringing cannon and sword to impose a terrible will upon his own people, finally crossing the Rio Grande to lay the same lash across the shoulders of the Americanocolonists. He had slaughtered his way up by the Alamo and La Bahia. At Goliad, Thomas had fallen, cut down with more than three hundred other helpless prisoners in the shadow of that grim stone fortress. Joshua Buckalew had been among the fortunate few who escaped in the confusion of smoke and fire and dying men.
Now, suddenly, he still didn’t completely comprehend it—the war was over. From Houston’s camp the prisoner presidentehad sent orders by courier for all Mexican troops to retreat beyond the Rio Grande. Texas no longer belonged to Mexico; it was a free and sovereign republic, rich in land and hope, but in all other things as poor as Job’s turkey.
This was April. Time to go home now and plow the corn.
Muley Dodd pointed westward across the intermittent stretches of water which dotted the greening plain. Heavy rains all month had made eastern Texas a hell for both armies—Mexican and Texan. It would be slow, traveling home. “It’s awful far, Josh,” Muley worried. “You reckon we can make it there with Antonio?”
Josh shook his head, for he had his doubts. “We’ll try.”
Except for a bit of sugar, coffee and cornmeal scrounged from among the defeated Mexicans—who were poorly fed themselves—they would have to live off the land. But Texas had deer and wild turkey aplenty, and sometimes bear. Farther west, where the settlements thinned, there would be wild cattle descended from the original mission herds. The diet was monotonous sometimes, but nobody ever starved.
Josh swung carefully up onto his horse, favoring the wounded arm, sucking a sharp breath between his teeth as the pain gripped hard.
Ramón Hernandez’ brow creased. “Josh,” he said in Spanish, “that arm will give you trouble. Perhaps it is better if you wait a few more days. I can get home alone.”
Josh doubted that. A lone Mexican rider caught by a roving Texan patrol would probably be shot before he could bring out his army papers and explain that he had fought in Juan Seguin’s Mexican company on the side of Sam Houston. The dark brown man’s skin would be taken as evidence enough that he belonged to the enemy.
Josh replied in English. They did that most of the time, the two, each talking in the language that came easiest but understanding the other nevertheless. “I’ll heal.” He glanced at little Muley Dodd, who was off saying his goodbyes to men he had met in Houston’s camp. “Besides, I’ll be obliged for your help. Muley’s intentions are good, but sometimes his results are poor.”
“He fought well,” Ramón pointed out.
Josh nodded but held his opinion. Muley had always been what people charitably called “slow.” Like some lonesome hound dog, he had attached himself to Josh and Thomas and had trailed along with them all the way down from Tennessee. He had no home, so the Buckalews gave him one. Muley was good help if someone told him what to do; he would break his back without a whimper. But he had to be watched like a child whose curiosity outweighs its judgment.
The matter settled, they rode in silence among the huge old oaks, from which the long beards of Spanish moss hung in cheerless disarray like funeral wreaths. Josh never looked back. Most of the time he gazed through the rain at the trail ahead, though now and again he quietly studied the faces of Muley Dodd and Ramón Hernandez.
Ramón. Pity, what the war had done to Ramón. He had always been the jovial one, quick to smile, quick to sing, the best at roping wild cattle, the quickest to throw a raw-treed Mexican saddle on an unbroken mustang and swing up shouting. His brother Antonio had been the grim one, never smiling, never seeing anything but the flat and the gray and the black. Now Antonio lay wrapped in that blanket, dead, and Ramón had taken on the face of Antonio...solemn, unsmiling. It was not a face that fit him. But that was the way of war.
They rode hunched against the slow, chilling rain, minds running over the violence they had put behind them. Ramón’s and Josh’s, anyway. Muley seldom thought back. His mind was always foraging ahead, flushing out one wild notion after another, the way a pup flushes rabbits but seldom catches one.
Muley’s stubbled face twisted as he tried to puzzle through an idea. “Josh, them fellers at camp, they was tellin’ me Texas don’t belong to Mexico no more. They was tellin’ me it’s a republic. That’s really somethin‘, ain’t it?”
“I reckon so, Muley.”
“I thought it must be.” He frowned. “Josh, what isa republic?”
“Well, Muley, it’s...” Josh didn’t know quite what to tell him. “It means we’re free, Muley. We’re independent.”
“You mean we’re like a slave that’s had his chains took off?”
“Somethin’ like that. We belonged to Mexico and had to do what they told us to. Now we do what we want to.”
“Like, we don’t have to work no more unless it suits us?”
Josh scratched his head. “Look, Muley, a man is free, but still he ain’tfree. I mean, nobody can tell him he’s got to work, but if he don’t, he goes hungry. It’s like that with a republic. It’s free from other countries, but it ain’t ever free from responsibility. It’s got to raise food or starve. It’s got to make its clothes or go naked. It’s got to keep up an army or its enemies will run over it. In other words, it’s got to take care of itself. Nobody els...