The Diezmo by Rick Bass (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

jockeying and plotting, with scrapes becoming increasingly frequent around each night’s campfire, though the next day always brought renewed solidarity.

The weather grew colder and rainy, our bellies gaunt and our clothes shabby. Captain Green’s letter was tattered nearly to pieces now, and our fiddles had all been lost or left behind.

Orlando Phelps and I and the other boys fished in the evenings. In the deepest pools of the Rio Grande there were catfish far bigger than anything ever hauled out of the James. For bait, we used the cut-up shanks of deer legs, ladled from our evening stew, or the offal of javelinas, or rabbits, or small birds. The catfish were always hungry, and there were endless numbers of them.

Seated by a fire on the riverbank, we each baited a big hook, tossed our lines in, and waited. We talked about home, and what we’d do when we got back. John Hill was particularly homesick and spoke often of his younger brothers and sisters. “There’s this big tree we liked to all climb,” he said, and then corrected himself. “This tree we like to climb. You can see all the way to the Brazos. It’s a cool place in the summer. We would all five climb up in that tree and nap like coons, in the breeze, when we had our chores done.”

A ferocious splashing commenced out in the river, a shout came from one of the boys, and then there was a sound like a cow trying to swim the river. And all the cheers and curses that went up would surely have alerted any soldiers on the Mexican side. The boys got the fish up on the bank, and clubbed it before it could break the line and slither back into the river.

Gasping, flopping, writhing in the sand, the fish looked half as large as a calf. We caught several every evening, but it wasn’t the same as with James Shepherd before the war. It was satisfying but not pleasant.

Some of the catfish were so big they broke the line and took our hooks, and when we lost all our hooks, we whittled new ones from green mesquite and huisache. Every evening we landed two or three dragonlike monsters and were proud to help provision the straggling army.

Henry Whaling, a large youth of eighteen, busied himself catching smaller fish in the shallows, using crickets for bait. His fish were little larger than sardines, too small to bother dragging back to camp, so he made his own fire in the sand by the river and cooked them on a stick and ate them as fast as he caught them, a dozen or sometimes two in an evening.

On such nights, war seemed far away and almost forgotten. The next day on the trail, many of us could barely stay awake. Lulled by the jingle of the horses’ bits and the ship-like creak of old leather, we kept falling asleep in our saddles. We would lurch back into wakefulness just in time to keep from falling from our horses. And it seemed that as we napped, We traveled to some deep, wonderful place, from which we emerged refreshed, even gilded; and shaking our heads to clear them from the dreamy residue of that brief voyage, we took the reins in both hands and nudged our horses into a trot, hurrying to catch up.

One evening, after we set up camp, we heard a single shot, not from across the border but from behind us. Thinking we were being fired upon, we scrambled onto our horses, leaving our cooking fires and extra stock untended, and charged off into the brush under the semicommand of scattered officers.

But what we found was fifteen-year-old John Hill, huddled crying over the body of his fourteen-year-old friend Jesse Yocum.

They’d been out rabbit hunting, crawling through the brush, and a branch snagged the trigger of Hill’s gun, discharging a bullet into Yocum’s back. Hill hurried to Yocum, turned him over, and saw a gaping exit wound in his ribs. Yocum barely had time to forgive Hill before he died.

We carried the body back to camp and wrapped it in blankets to prepare it for burial the next day. All that night, the camp was kept awake by Hill’s sobbing.

In the morning, under a cold rain with a northwest wind, we buried Yocum in an unmarked grave on a bluff of the Rio Grande, Yocum’s head slightly elevated and his boots pointing north into the republic younger than himself.

Shepherd’s arm was the next thing lost. Some days we smelled it from a distance, and other days there was little scent at all. At times, the flesh of his arm was putrescent, bruised and streaked with rivulets of blood and pus, grit and debris. Nightly, Shepherd yelled as Dr. Sinnickson attempted to irrigate the wound, though each day the wind brought new dust and dirt. Sometimes it seemed to have sealed over with a vitreous, almost metallic sheen, and on those days the odor was subdued, and we could hope that beneath the fiery purple scab, the flesh was knitting.

Some days even his breath was gangrenous, and I thought we might lose him yet. Instead, three days after we buried Yocum, Shepherd lost the arm. Sinnickson had been preparing him for the eventuality, but Shepherd had been resisting it. The issue resolved itself when Shepherd passed out while riding. He landed on his bad arm, rupturing it. Pulpy fragments remained on the rocks where he fell. The arm was bleeding profusely, and Sinnickson tied it off.

A tent was set up. Sinnickson directed Shepherd to drink three glasses of whiskey, while we built a low fire in the rain, in order to boil the carving knives and fine-toothed saw he carried in his satchel. They tied Shepherd down, with Cameron’s help.

While Shepherd screamed and cursed—before he passed out—Sinnickson sawed the arm off through the top of the shoulder, as if quartering a deer, taking a piece of the shoulder, clamping