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

group. The vote had whipped the men into a frenzy. They believed that even if Ampudia and Canales commanded six thousand, our expedition could handle them. Fisher expressed the deepest regret about the need to execute the priest and the sheepherder. Fisher explained it to the men, and then, in heartfelt words, explained it also to the priest and sheepherder, admonishing the villains Ampudia and Canales for abandoning the priest.

Fisher instructed his aide to take the two out into the brush and bind them to a tree, and he assigned Shepherd to fire the shots. A small group, including Fisher, took the priest and sheepherder, shackled and bound, hobbling into the brush. Shepherd walked beside Fisher with his chin up and his eyes forward, seeming to take no notice of the priest and sheepherder.

The priest looked around him and his eyes fell on me. “Vayan con Dios,” he said softly, “soldados desgraciados.” And then he and the others continued on into the brush. A short while later, we heard one gunshot and then the second.

Fisher and Shepherd came walking out of the brush—the others remained behind to do the burying and to construct crude crosses—and I could not help but notice that Fisher looked pleased: as if Shepherd had performed exactly as Fisher wished, with no weakness or hesitation.

We spent the afternoon huddled in the rain, planning our attack, sending out scouts and then conferring with them, checking and rechecking our weapons and imagining all the different ways to kill the enemy.

At the time, our plan seemed to me bold and elegant. Canales had stationed some of his men around the northern perimeter of the town, ostensibly to defend it but possibly to lure us to fight there. Fisher, having fought him before, suspected that if we fought Canales on the perimeter, he would retreat into the core of Mier, where Ampudia’s larger force and the rest of Canales’s men would be waiting. The Mexicans were lovers of pageantry, he said, and Green concurred; the Mexicans in the town would be lined up in cavalry formations, waiting to be stirred to action by the shrilling of trumpets. In light of this knowledge, it was decided that when Canales’s men on the perimeter turned and fled, we would pursue them into Mier, pretending not to know it was a trap, but we would not pursue them to the center of the town. Instead, we’d commandeer some of the adobe homes. They were built shoulder to shoulder, and we could use them to stand our ground or could move slowly forward by knocking out the wall of one adobe and rushing into the next one—gnawing our way through the town, as Fisher described it—and, in the end, after we killed all of Canales’s and Ampudia’s troops, we would also have leveled the town, and it would serve as an example to other villages not to resist our advance.

I looked over at Green and his aide to see how they were taking Fisher’s plan. Green was pale and listless, unlike his usual confrontational, swaggering self.

“We will crush them,” Fisher said. “We will destroy them. We will annihilate them, we will lay waste to everything they ever owned as punishment for having resisted us earlier, when we were moderate. They will wish forever that they had listened to us rather than having opposed us, and when we are done, we will find the treasures they sought to keep hidden.”

We waited in the freezing rain until dark and then crossed in the rapids so that the Mexicans would not hear the sound of our horses’ hooves. We rode four and five abreast. We crossed quickly, and before I knew it we were suddenly among some of Canales’s outposts, passing so close to them in the darkness that when their horses shivered in the rain we heard the animals’ brass armor jangling and rattling, yet the enemy had no idea of our presence; we could as well have been ghosts.

It was Green, I think, not Fisher, who gave the order to attack—we might have been able to ride right on through them undetected and into Mier, to face Ampudia’s men—but that was not the plan.

We heard Green roar—I was surprised to hear it come from behind me, and realized I must have ridden out slightly ahead of the expedition—and my first thought was that he had somehow been injured. He sounded like the mother black bear I had seen kept in a wooden cage above the James River, being fed and fattened through the summer and into the autumn by the man who had trapped her, preparing her like a pig for slaughter.

Rifles and cannons began to go off all around me, and then the woods filled with flashes of light and the odor of burnt powder, and of fresh-cut sap from the limbs and branches torn loose in the sudden fusillade.

Bullets flew all around us, and leaves fell and floated among us, and the horses were barely manageable. Ill shuttered glimpses we saw the enemy wheeling and galloping south, as Fisher predicted they would.

Shouting and whooping and reloading and firing again, we pursued Canales’s men, and in the rout, I looked around for Shepherd but could not find him. Instead, I saw dozens of my own kind riding past, surging, raucous and confident and frightened and joyous—and for myself, I felt neither fear nor joy but was carried on the surge. We were a wave that crashed through the woods and into the town of Mier.

3

Victory

WE FOUGHT as if charmed.

The families in the adobe houses fled into the streets, and we used the butts of our rifles to knock out the walls of first one home and then the next. Canales’s men, retreating into Mier, caught the brunt of the fire from Ampudia’s men, who were stationed in the center of town, and many of them were cut down more quickly by their own than by us.

There were candles and lanterns