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

He did not seem troubled by his situation with us. He seemed prepared to live or die—accepting either with dignity—and it was this quality that kept us clustered around him.

We waited all morning and into the afternoon for Fisher and his men to return. The priest appeared unfazed, though later in the day he asked if he could have a little privacy in a tent, so we fastened a leash to his wrists and ankles and allowed him to go into the tent by himself, where he stayed for a good two hours. We assumed he was praying, though when I went in to take him some fish soup at dinner, I found that he was sound asleep, lying on the ground on his back with his hands clasped and folded neatly over his chest.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and after a moment inquired about Joseph Berry’s knee—asking how long it had been infected and how he had injured it—and said that he had offered up a prayer on Joseph Berry’s behalf.

Fisher and his regiment didn’t get back until shortly after dark, having waited on the riverbank all day to no avail: they left two men there overnight, in case the ransom was merely running late. They had discussed going back into town but feared a trap.

That night, they ordered that the priest not be given any food—as if by punishing him in secret the ransom seekers might somehow, through divine intuition, be inspired to search harder for the ransom, or as if the priest, with his allotted hours expired, were living on borrowed time.

The priest was quieter, that last night. Those of us who were guarding him sought to assure him that we were certain the ransom would be delivered the next day, but he remained courteous though distant and, finally, with our permission, bid us good night. Shackled, he crawled into his tent, and after a little while we heard him snoring.

We went to bed not long after that, save for the lookouts. It was the quietest and strangest Christmas Eve I have ever known. I think that each of us was considering the priest’s plight.

The next day, Christmas, we had a short prayer, officiated by Sinnickson, who had also been a preacher for a while. I sat next to Shepherd and watched how he labored to cut his dried mutton with his knife before he finally gave up, picking it up with his free hand and gnawing on it, as many of the nonofficers did.

Otherwise, Shepherd held himself like an officer, with an erect, guarded posture, and dressed like an officer, in one of Fisher’s coats with the sleeve pinned, and sat his horse like an officer, and carried an officer’s sword. But he gnawed on that mutton like the most savage of us—like Bigfoot Wallace himself, or even the brute Cameron. When he saw me watching him, he scowled and stared at me with such steel that I felt we had become enemies.

We finished our thin rations, and Fisher and his men were about to ride back down to the river to wait again for the ransom when a lone Mexican sheepherder came walking into camp, unarmed.

We were antsy, and some of the irregulars who first spied the sheepherder nearly cut him down with their muskets and pistols; but the sheepherder raised his hands carefully, and they allowed him to come all the way into camp.

He said that no one had sent him, but that he had come on his own, out of concern for the priest and as a gesture of goodwill as well to the Texans, to let us know that two of Mexico’s fiercest commanders, General Pedro de Ampudia and General Antonio Canales, had arrived in Ciudad Mier less than a day after the priest was taken hostage. Ampudia and Canales were commanding nearly a thousand men, the sheepherder said, and they had instructed the town not to pay the ransom.

Fisher cursed and leapt up, spilling his coffee and burning himself, and, in a rage, ordered the sheepherder to be taken hostage too. Green and Fisher’s aides complied, binding the sheepherder’s wrists and ankles with rope before leading him to the priest’s tent, where the priest welcomed him like a lost brother.

There followed a brief and heated counsel, unique in that the soldiers were included. The reason for this, as well as for Fisher’s agitation, was that many of our men had once ridden with Canales. Canales, who had renounced his Mexican citizenship, had been a soldier in the Texas army—a mercenary, and a fierce one at that. He and many of the men among us had fought against General Ampudia, who never renounced his homeland.

Ampudia, the men said, was fiercer than Canales. In one battle, back in Texas, when the two men opposed each other, Ampudia captured one of Canales’s fellow insurrectionists and decapitated him, boiled his head in a vat of grease, and stuck it on a pike in front of the man’s home. That Ampudia and Canales had joined forces set off new currents of alternating fear and bravado in the camp—the fear hidden, the bravado manifest.

Green convinced Fisher that we should take a vote on whether to engage Ampudia and Canales, capture the town of Mier, and then continue south, looting and raising more funds—or whether we should turn back. Fisher hesitated, ill at ease with any notion of democracy within the military ranks, but his rage had subsided enough for him to see the reason behind Green’s proposal. A militia that determined its own fate would be more committed going into battle, and we would need every bit of ferocity and valor we could muster.

The men voted almost unanimously to attack—about twenty men abstained, and another small group counseled that we wait for a more propitious time, though after the vote the naysayers and the abstainers allowed themselves to be carried with the