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

the artery with horsehair thread and then cauterizing the flesh before sewing the flap of bruised skin back over the wound. He told us the gangrene was close to Shepherd’s heart and gave him a one in ten chance of surviving, but he did not say this to Shepherd.

Captain Fisher wrapped the arm in a sheet and grabbed me by my arm, and we stumbled off into the rain, toward the officer’s latrine, where he got a shovel and thrust it at me. Then we reeled off into the brush, down toward the river.

I dug, while Fisher knelt clutching the arm. The soil was sandy and soft in the rain, and soon I had a pit deep enough to bury a body in. He handed me the arm and watched as I laid it in the sand, climbed out, and shoveled sand over it. We stood by the mound until finally Fisher fetched a large rounded stone from the bluff and placed it on the mound as a marker.

We went back to the tent, where Shepherd lay unconscious. Fisher, Sinnickson, and I sat waiting for Shepherd to come to, and I wondered if I might be asked to ride up front, and whether I wanted to. Sometime after midnight, Shepherd awoke wailing and thrashing in pain. We struggled to hold him down, Shepherd cursing us, Mexicans, war, God, his family, and all the world. Fisher’s aide, Franklin, ran to get the big Scot, Ewen Cameron, to help hold Shepherd down again, while others tied rope and strips of bed sheet around him.

For nearly two hours, Shepherd carried on so loudly that wolves and coyotes answered with their own wails. Finally he fell unconscious. I wanted to stay there in the tent with him, but Fisher told me to go get some rest.

No one in camp believed that Shepherd would survive the night. Money changed hands, wagers made on his demise in terms not of if but when. My campmates’ voices fell when I approached. “Is he living?” Billy Reese asked, just a boy himself. “Is he alive?” I said that he was, and that he was going to survive and live a full, useful life, doing many great things. The men and boys paused, then resumed their wagering.

We stayed in camp for five days while Shepherd’s shoulder healed, Sinnickson administering laudanum in scrimping doses, and only when Fisher ordered him to. Shepherd slept and was semiconscious most of the time. His waking moments were highlighted by screams and curses, making not just the men but even the horses in their hobbles nervous, and frightening the nearby game, so that our hunters had to travel farther to find success.

The boys and I fished each evening and napped during the day, wrapped in our blankets under scraggly mesquite trees, with the stark December sun on our faces. Several times each day I checked on Shepherd. On occasion, he was awake and not howling but silent and grim-faced. He looked ten years older and fierce. He wanted to know what we had done with the arm and if I was certain that it hadn’t been salvageable. As if he were considering returning to it, or returning to something. The boy he had been, perhaps.

Meanwhile, the tension grew between Green and Fisher. Green wanted to move on, whether Shepherd was ready or not. Sinnickson said Shepherd would benefit from another week of rest, but Shepherd was antsy to travel again.

I wondered where Somervell was by now. It was a few days before Christmas, and what I wanted was a fine Christmas feast at home with my family. But most of the men were anxious to forge south, which was more perplexing when I learned that Green and many of his men, including Cameron and Wallace, had been captured by the Mexicans before, while they were under the command of Zachary Taylor.

Green and several hundred of his men had been scheduled for execution until they vowed, under penalty of death, never to take up arms against Mexico again and never even to venture back into Mexico. (Under much these same terms, Santa Anna was allowed to return to Mexico after his defeat at San Jacinto. Some said he retired and was living on the coast in Vera Cruz, raising fighting cocks and tending a garden of orchids, while others said he was plotting a return and had been a secret partner in General Woll’s raids on San Antonio.) Whatever pact Green and his men had made, they were ready, less than a year later, to betray it.

Aggression mounted, the turmoil in our spirits agitated by the delay, the cold wet weather, and the increasing squalor of camp. There were more fights, until finally the situation grew so untenable that Fisher agreed we had to move, whether Shepherd was ready or not. Fisher planned to leave me and his aide, Franklin, with Shepherd, with instructions to catch up as soon as Shepherd could travel; but on the morning of the sixth day, as the men broke camp, rolling up wet tents and unhobbling the stock, Shepherd asked Franklin to saddle his horse, and then climbed up onto it and declared himself ready.

He didn’t look graceful, hauling himself up onto that horse. Shepherd’s legs, never powerful, were weak from his ordeal, and he nearly fell backwards. Franklin hovered to catch him, but once he was up, he sat with a certain nobility. The men gave a great cheer, Fisher looked overcome with pride, and we moved out, Shepherd in the lead between Fisher and Green, the ranks behind them serpentine, disjointed, rusty, but rested. Ready to kill and be killed.

The weather grew worse—fog and cold mist that turned to sleet. Icicles hung from our horses’ nostrils and the brims of our hats. Our rations and clothes were worse than ever, but our spirits received a boost when, in a steady downpour, Henry Whaling, Billy Reese, and I glimpsed the horrific and exhilarating sight of the