Skin Medicine

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.