Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Man inside the Alamo
Mike Kearby
Author’s note How did David Crockett die at the battle of the Alamo? This question has been the catalyst for much rancor among historians, Americans, Mexicans, Texans, and history aficionados. The story below while fictional, offers a plausible explanation of what could have happened that Sunday morning in San Antonio and might well satisfy both sides of the Crockett question.
The man from Tennessee, tall and well-poised, marched across the Alamo courtyard with long, lively strides. Poet, teacher, attorney, and merchant, a noticeable agitation furrowed his brow this day, and his mouth twisted in brooding expectation as to the reason behind his summoning. He gripped a Kentucky flintlock in his right hand with such force that his knuckles whitened around the walnut stock. Upon each stride, the eight-pound rifle swung forward in such perfect rhythm that man and gun appeared to be one. Beside him, a fellow Tennessean, although considerably shorter, and rounder, matched the man’s brisk stride step-for-step.
As the two men crossed in front of the officers’ quarters, the shorter man inhaled. “Can you believe it?” he said effusively.
The man from Tennessee remained silent.
The two skirted the low wall in front of the chapel and then angled right for the palisade. Behind the breastwork, a parapet rose diagonally to the southeast. Gathered on either side of the parapet were a group of Tennesseans, volunteers to the Texas auxiliary corps. The men urged him forward with frantic hand movements.
“Hurry,” one of the Tennesseans gushed.
“You won’t believe your eyes,” whispered another and pointed at a loophole in the vertical timbers.
The air of the February early afternoon still held the chill of the previous day’s cold front and both men’s breaths frosted in spite of the afternoon sun.
The man ignored the good-natured banter and positioned himself so that he could look through the porthole.
To his left, standing on an earthen footstep, the bear hunter gazed out over the field through a long glass and chuckled. “It be a fair shot, but one well worth the ball and powder.”
The man nodded and slipped the flintlock through the cut out. “We’ll see.”
From behind, one of the volunteers snorted under his breath. “Does he have the steadiness?”
The man turned and looked back at the snorter.
The snorter lifted his shoulders and tightened his lips. “Was only a question.”
The man stared down the hand-blued barrel of his long rifle. “Sounded more like nay-saying skepticism to me.”
A chorus, arising from the others, was directed at the snorter, “Close your pie-hole and let the man work.”
The man hesitated, curled the corners of his mouth down, and then pulled the fox-fur cap from off his head. “That seems to be the best piece of advice I’ve heard since arriving at this place.”
The old bear hunter glanced down at the man. “By the eternal,” he laughed. “Fire that pea shooter, man.”
A crooked smile broke from the corner of the man’s mouth as he placed his cap on one of the vertical timbers. “At your pleasure, Colonel.”
The bear hunter put his eye to the long glass once again and remarked, “Show his Excellency over there just how well a Kentuckian flintlock fires.”
The man pulled the flint-striker to full-cock and looked down the barrel.
“Make him flutter,” the others sang.
The man, inhaled, closed his left eye, and squeezed the trigger. The flint rolled forward and contacted the frizzen.
Sparks flew.
Gunpowder erupted.
The gun bore into the man’s shoulder.
The Tennesseans waited in quiet anticipation.
Two hundred yards away, a foot in front of the Mexican leader, a spate of dust puffed skyward. The general with a titled name longer than the flintlock’s barrel, Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrónhis Excellency, stepped back at the dulled detonationuntouched.
The man made a face and marveled at his missed shot.
Santa Anna took a short glance at the raised powdery earth a foot in front of him, shook his head, and then slowly dissolved back into his reconnoitering trooper line.
“Huzzah!” shouted the man’s friends. They slapped the man on his back. Much whooping and hollering followed.
“That seemed to addle his Excellency a’ bit!”
The man lowered the flintlock and scratched at his side-whiskers. “Air’s a ‘might thick this afternoon,” he offered weakly as excuse.
“Maybe,” the bear hunter rejoined, and then added as an afterthought, “Anyhow, I figure you’ve chased him into the thickets for now.”
The man shook his head. “Maybe,” he said and stared out across the palisade toward the massed force of soldados.
“Did you see his Excellency dance?” one volunteer asked.
“Stepped like he was born in Eastern Tennessee,” another uttered.
“He thought he’d gone coon for sure,” still another chortled.
But the man from Tennessee just fixated on the spot where the Mexican general had stood. He recalculated the distance between his gun and his Excellency, and wondered briefly what might have been.
***
Six days later, the rocket illuminations, soft across the early morning March sky, coalesced and fell gently upon the Alamo. Sleeping soundly below the palisade wall for the first night since the Mexican Army’s arrival, the man slapped at his ear to dislodge the annoyance and squinted to remove the flicker of red dancing in front of his closed eyelid.
From above him, a familiar voice sounded, though distant and faint, “Wake up, sirs, the fights begun.”
The man blinked his eyes open and dragged a rough tongue around the inside of his mouth. The charcoal shadow of the bear hunter lingered over him.
“The Mexicans are on the walls,” the bear hunter said. His rifle rested in a loophole.
The man rubbed at his eyes. “Whaa…?”
The bear hunter looked south from the palisade and pulled his flint to full-cock. “I’d consider arising quick now if you want to be in the fight.”
Somewhere, on the other side of mission, the shouts and screams of men under attack caused the man to spring to his feet. He grabbed his flintlock with his right hand and patted the pistol in his waistbelt with his left. “You must not have slept,” he said.
There was no reply, only the sound of powder flash.
Across the courtyard, an eight-pounder boomed. The man threw a quick glance at the northwest corner just as the second eight-pounder exploded and exposed the wall in an eerie light.
The other volunteers were on their feet now. The man could feel them around him. He pushed the barrel of his long rifle through a cut out and fired.
The screams and curses of the desperately determined issued from every corner of the fortress.
The man yelled out encouragement to his companions, but the noise and smoke and darkness simply drowned his words away.
And in that instant, in this place, Texas, a soul-rattling revelation shook the manthat in the dark-veiled chaos of the Alamo, no matter the numbers of men struggling beside him; every man was left to his own fighting and his own dying.
The man shook the thoughts from his head and pressed his shoulder back into the rifle. And then, methodically began the process of firing and reloading. After four rounds were expended, the attackers backed away.
“They’re foundering,” the man yelled, relieved.
“Don’t be sure!” the bear hunter screamed. “Behind us!”
The man turned, and though he could not see individual enemy combatants, he saw the black surge filling the main plaza. A brief, paralyzing fear held him in a cold grip and prickled his spine. Movement flashed beside him.
The bear hunter was up and running. “To the low wall!” he screamed. “We have to keep them from the chapel, boys!”
The man watched in fascination at the quickness of the fifty-year-old.
“Well, come on, now!” the bear hunter shouted.
The man blinked, shook off his palsy, and ran crouched-over for the wall directly in front of the church.
The battle’s closeness nudged against the man. They were all now fighting under a thick cloud of gunpowder smoke. A companion backed into him, screamed, and then pitched forward, slashing at the fume with a butcher knife.
Some defenders coughed in the suffocating cloud.
Some screamed in both fear and anger.
Others just cursed, both Mexicans and God.
The man lowered the flintlock and fumbled to reload amidst the confusion and death.
Out of the chaos, the bear hunter shouted orders again, “Fall back to the chapel!” And then turned to point at the church. “We’ll be able to reload behind the doors!”
“Yes!” the man screamed. “And the powder’s there, too!”
The bear hunter nodded and lowering his shoulders, began to back up toward the safety of the chapel while firing into the plaza beyond the low wall.
The remaining six Tennesseans huddled tight and followed en masse.
The man, his back to the church door, shuddered at the fast approaching carnage. The screams of desperate men choked the air in two languages. The man glanced over his shoulder. The bear hunter was gone. “Colonel?” he shouted.
No answer followed.
Then suddenly, the man stumbled and fell over a lump of darkness. He rolled on the ground before righting himself on all fours. Beneath him, on the hard soil, the bear hunter lay on his back, eyes opened.
Shot.
Dead.
And then the man’s fear fought its way forward again.
The bear hunter was dead?
He looked away, panicked and scared. He fumbled the pistol from his waistbelt and fired without aim into the surging dark snarl.
“Come on, man!” the others pleaded. “For here they come!”
The man ignored his companions’ pleas and glanced back into the bear hunter’s face. The once gentle visage was blackened beyond recognition with the soot and grease of battle. The sounds of the attack lapsed away.
“We’re shuttin’ the doors!”
The man swallowed and rolled the bear hunter’s familiar leather-billed round cap from his head. He rose, cap in hand, and watched in dismay as the chapel doors swung shut.
Then the battle returned, and with it, all of the loudness and disorder of conflicted struggle. He grimaced at the chapel doors, looked left, and in the bedlam, raced untouched for the long barracks.
Inside, the man joined a small group of defenders, but he couldn’t dismiss the thought that if such a man as the bear hunter could die so effortlessly, what possible hope could any of the rest of them expect?
***
Near sunrise, a Mexican General stood in front of a raised mattress covering the doorway to one of the barracks rooms. He spoke reassuringly to the six men hidden behind the pad. One of the men stuck his long rifle over the top of the cover. A dirty sock was tied around the gun’s barrel.
From behind the mattress, a tired voice asked, “How do we know you can be trusted?”
The general stiffened and smoothed his jacket. “I am General Manuel Fernandez de Castrillón. I am a career soldier and an officer of the Mexican Army. As such, I offer you my word and my protection.”
***
General Castrillón marched the six across the main plaza of the Alamo and secured the men in a small cannonade structure on the north end of the west wall. “Please remain here,” he said. “His Excellency will arrive from the north battery soon, and when he does, I will intercede on your behalf.” The general then turned to exit the small enclosure.
The man from Tennessee, his face darkened and blued with gunpowder, pushed the bear hunter’s cap toward the back of his head and cleared his throat.
Castrillón paused and looked back at the tall man. “Yes, Colonel Crockett?”
“I…that is, we…” The man’s voice faltered.
Castrillón raised his brow. “Yes, Colonel?”
The man looked at the five standing with him and bowed his head. “Just want to thank you.”
Castrillón nodded, started to leave again, slowed, and with pause, pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.
The man from Tennessee waited, uncertain.
“Colonel?” the general finally asked. “Is it true that you have killed close to a hundred bears in your lifetime?”
The man cast his tired eyes in the direction of the chapelto where the bear hunter lay deadto Tennessee and its mountains, and its rivers and fertile valleys, and of a wife
and three children. The absurdity of the morn struck him. Here were two men from different lands in a small fort carrying on a civil conversation as if the carnage and destruction that permeated every foot of earth around them did not exist.
“Colonel?”
The man turned his attention back to Castrillón and after a reflective pause exhaled a short breath before answering, “I reckon the figure to be closer to a hundred and twenty-five, General.”
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