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

still burning in the houses we entered, and we could see in the dim light crude Christ-and-crucifix carvings on the walls, tattered Bibles on the mantels, paintings of Christ, and novenas everywhere.

Canales’s and Ampudia’s men were trying to follow us into the homes, but they were easy to defend. We had only to station a few men by each door to shoot point-blank each soldier, one by one or two by two, as they attempted to storm those small low doorways.

Soon the entrances were stacked high with dead Mexican soldiers, and as each one fell his gun was wrested from him and tossed down to those of us who sat or lay beneath windows, where we peered up and fired out at Ampudia’s men across the street. Occasionally there was a simultaneity between my one shot, among dozens, and the tumbling of a rider. As if his horse, or the rider himself, had suddenly encountered some rope strung chin-high through the darkness. We moved from one adobe to the next, snuffing out the candles and lanterns left burning by the occupants who had fled.

From their snipers’ posts in town, Ampudia’s men could look down and take note of our methodical advance by the winking-out last glimmers of candlelight: each new adobe growing dark as we advanced into it, eating our way into the town like some beast gnawing into a carcass, or like a bear ripping through honeycomb.

The Mexicans aimed their cannons at the adobe huts, knocking out head-sized holes with each blast, but in truth these only aided us, for they gave us better windows from which to shoot.

There were too many of us to fit in the windows all at once, so we took turns fighting and sleeping. There was much revelry and good-natured bantering going on among us, and a young man from Rosharon, Joseph McCutcheon, would later write, “There is no sight more grand or sublime than the flash of opposing firearms at the hour of midnight. No sound can produce such an idea of grandeur, and engender such intense excitement, as the ringing report of rifles, the hoarse roar of musketry, the awful thunder of artillery, and the encouraging shouts of fellow man, against unlike men, all mingled in din and confusion.

“This night was by far the most exciting Christmas scene that ever I had witnessed!”

It was not until about midway through the night that a kind of heaviness began to descend on me, a melancholia made all the more profound by its absence in those around me—my fellow Texans were jostling one another for space at the windows, arguing about whose turn it was to get to do more shooting—and I was overwhelmed with homesickness, and with the sure and deep knowledge of having made a terribly wrong choice.

The loneliness felt as heavy as a trunk of lead, and I was suddenly nauseated and wanted no more turns at the window, and no more war, though it was far too late for that.

I moved to the back of the adobe house and took refuge beneath an overturned table. I pretended to be busy cleaning and reloading my gun, examining some malfunction. Several times my friends from LaGrange and Bexar offered me their guns or the weaponry of dead Mexicans, but I declined, told them to go ahead without me.

I made my decision to leave that night, or perhaps in the morning, when I might stand a better chance of finding a horse. I could be back across the river in less than a day, and home three or four days after that. The thought that I could be home in four days, farming, helped get me through that dark night, even as the shouts and whoops of my comrades indicated that they were having the best time of their lives.

I felt a new lightness, and I had the curious thought that this could be somewhat like the feeling James Shepherd might have had in finding his own new path, riding now with Fisher as he was. As if all his life he had labored down the wrong path—had in fact been placed upon the wrong one at birth—and had only now found his own true road, just as my own was to return home, and to leave the warring to soldiers.

I don’t think I was very frightened. I was simply hungry for home.

I got up from beneath my table and went searching for Shepherd, to tell him of my plan. I did not want him worrying about me, thinking that I might have been lost in the river crossing, or in battle, beneath some rubble of adobe, hundreds of miles from home.

I found him four houses ahead, in the farthest dwelling of our advance. He was easy to recognize in cannon-fire silhouette, with his missing shoulder. He was leaning against a portal, a long-barreled pistol in his hand. He was not firing it but was instead only staring out the portal. The pistol hung limp from his hand, as if fastened by a thong or bracelet, and he seemed relaxed, though his gaze into the darkness was intent, and he seemed to be doing some sort of mental calculation.

“Does it hurt?” I asked. He seemed to be favoring his wound, trying to lean against the adobe in a way to avoid putting pressure on the other side of his body.

“It always hurts,” he said. He glanced at me, then resumed his watching through the cannon-shot portal. “Step behind me—they don’t know this hole is here yet. If I shoot, they’ll start shooting here, too. I’m just watching, right now. I want to wait until I can get a whole bunch of them.”

“Where’s Captain Fisher?” I asked. “Where’s Green?” He answered with a quick gesture of his head toward a back room. In the pulses of muzzle blast I could see through the open doorway the figures of two men seated at a table, deep in argumentative discussion, sipping soup from small clay bowls. I