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

Guerrero fell, he argued. Why not continue southward, and achieve even greater victory?

He and Green both scowled after these newest defectors, but being an unofficial army—more marauders than militia—neither had any true military authority, and with each passing defection they were reminded of this.

That afternoon we rode toward the little town of Ciudad Mier, where, that evening, we again took a priest hostage, demanding ransom before retiring to our ragged camp back in the brush. Fisher told the townspeople that they had forty-eight hours to deliver the ransom—ten thousand dollars, this time, to make up for the inadequacy of Guerrero—and that he would meet them on the bank of the Rio Grande on Christmas Eve Day.

I was part of the detail charged with guarding the priest, who seemed affable and forgiving. A lean man in his mid-fifties, he told us stories of saints and sinners he had known in his life. Men and women who had been little better than pagans, he said, as prone to pray to the animals of the fields and forests as to the highest of gods. Men and women who prayed to the weather, or the bare stone of the desert; or, worse yet, he said, who prayed not at all, but who instead assumed that all matters concerning their needs as well as their desires had been prearranged. He spoke to us partly in English and partly in Spanish, with Alfred Thurmond helping translate.

“There was one such man,” he said, “one who believed his destiny was laid before him like a gleaming road, and who believed he could pass through danger unharmed, like a man—a circus master passing through a crowd of lions or tigers. Jaguars,” the priest said, “and panteras.

“He could be said to be a good man, in that he concerned himself with the welfare of others less fortunate than him self, and the welfare of the village—but he did not believe that his life was built of choices. Did not believe that he was the mason, constructing it with each hour of his life, and each day.

“We argued often about this. Of course to such a man, prayer was unknown: there was no need for it. He simply followed his life. This man was a farmer,” the priest said, “and it was a source of frustration to the rest of us, and to the other farmers who worked so hard, that this man’s crops were always more bountiful than the other farmers’ in hard seasons, though this man, Pico, never troubled himself overmuch with his labors. Un medio,” the priest said, and one of our men clarified the interpretation, calling out “A half-ass,” and the priest shrugged, then nodded.

“I asked him to become a man of God,” the priest said. “I asked him to consider that many things in the world were undecided, things in which a strong and fiery heart could make a difference. Desperate things in need of salvation,” the priest said. “But Pico always shook his head and said that I was wrong.

“He ate and drank as he wished, philandered as he wished—his wife abandoned him—and yet, as I said, nothing mattered much to him. His heart was not afire; it could be neither changed nor harmed. If someone asked him for a favor—anything—he would do it—but he passed through his years like a sleepwalker. He smiled, joked, sang, worked. But he was asleep. I was the only one who knew it. Again and again, I tried to awaken him, but I could not.” The priest shook his head and looked down at his hands sorrowfully. As if the man had been his own brother.

“What happened to him?” I asked. “Is he still alive?”

The priest looked up and smiled at my interest. “I do not know,” he said. “I think that maybe he just went away. He vanished. We stopped seeing him, and no one knew what had become of him. It was as if he never was.”

But Pico was not the worst, the priest said. Most distressing of all to him, he said, were those who waited until the end to pray. He glanced around at us as if in secret commiseration rather than indictment. As if we already were, and always had been, men of God, to whom he could speak frankly about such things.

Certainly, the priest said, as a man of God himself, he welcomed the opportunity to receive the souls of those whose hearts changed in the last days, and the last hour, but it saddened him deeply, he said, to consider all the wasted time behind such last-minute conversions—the backwash, he called it, the rubble of compassion whose seeds never germinated, the toxic residue of a lifetime of ill deeds.

The priest had seen much waste in his lifetime, he told us, and much loneliness, and to him, the loneliness was the worst thing of all.

On Christmas Eve Day, Fisher took a detail to the riverbank to collect the ransom. Shepherd rode with him, so hard-faced, and looking so much older, that I barely recognized him, and when he turned to look back at camp before riding off, he looked right through me, not with anger or hostility or envy or sadness, but simply through me, as if one of us had already left this world.

“A friend of yours?” the priest asked, observing the strange moment.

I took a long time answering. “Yes,” I said finally.

He resumed his narrative about the streets and palaces in the kingdom of heaven—how such an architecture in the hearts of men and women and children gave way to the creation and construction of a similar architecture in the physical world, which those dreamers and initiates could then inhabit. He believed that a paucity of such compassion led to the construction of a life, and a landscape, of the destitute.

He looked around at us, and I felt he was reading our faces and fates as clearly as if he had unscrolled the map of a much-traveled country, as