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

could smell the soup; it must have been simmering on the stove when they came through this wall. It smelled of chicken stock, with hot peppers and onions, and I realized how famished I was.

I saw now that there was an empty bowl beside Shepherd, and I started to ask if I could have some soup but then did not. Shepherd kept looking at his window keenly, counting and watching.

“Captain says our rifles are better,” he said. He glanced down at his pistol. “Their old flintlocks aren’t worth shit in this rain. They keep misfiring. They’ve charged us three times, and we’ve put them down every time. I’ll bet there’s a thousand dead Mexicans out there.”

Another cannon burst sounded from across the village, and almost instantaneously there was an explosion above our heads, followed by a crumbling slide of adobe shell. A sifting, whispering powder poured down on us, the adobe returning to the sand and clay from which it had come.

Shepherd cursed and drew the big overcoat more tightly around him. I expected him to answer the cannon’s fire with fire of his own, but instead his eyes only narrowed and he marked that cannon’s position, too, keeping his own unannounced and lethal.

He turned to look at me almost as if surprised that I was still there. I was just about to let him know of my plans, and to ask if there were any messages he wanted me to convey to his family, when something in his demeanor stopped me.

I think he could see that I was done, that I had no heart or desire to kill any more of the enemy, and there was pity and scorn in his look, and even anger.

Why, you sonofabitch, I thought, with a flash of fire I had not even felt yet for the enemy. In friendship and loyalty, I have avoided judging you, and now you’re daring to judge me.

“Is there something you wanted to tell the captains?” he asked. He glanced in the direction from which I had come. “Are the other posts secure?”

I looked down at the empty bowl beside his portal.

I was just about ready to say to hell with it: the war, and all my old loyalties to this neighbor, this childhood friend. Sure, Sinnickson had saved his life, but the life of the child I had known was as gone as if the enemy had already claimed him back in Laredo.

I stared at him a moment longer, preparing to leave and to start my own new life, when Ampudia’s and Canales’s men sounded their fourth charge, sending two whole battalions. Fisher’s cunning in keeping the precise extent of our southern advance secret had had an unintended consequence, for now the Mexicans were storming over the top of our farthest adobe, believing it to be unoccupied.

We were obligated to cut them down.

At Shepherd’s command, a great number of men whom I had not earlier seen in our adobe came rushing forward, gripping a rifle and a pistol in each hand, and they filled every available crack and crevice in our structure. Someone jammed a rifle into my hands but then shoved me aside, and once more I found myself crouched at an open window, firing into the glimmering, sporadic lightning-light of the war, with the staccato images of the surprised Mexican soldiers throwing their arms skyward as they were shredded by our fusillade, suddenly lifting their arms as if to fly.

We cut them all down, the entire first wave and much of the second; but as we were reloading, the third and then the fourth wave was still coming, slowed only by their stumbling in the darkness over the mountains of their own dead. We could smell the odor of our gunpowder and the dust of crushed and shattered adobe all around us—but there was also another odor, the scent of gallons of blood—and then the Mexicans were at our walls, trying to press themselves through the doors and windows, so that we were having to beat them back with swords and the butts of our pistols and rifles. Ewen Cameron had gone out into an enclosed courtyard and was tearing loose the cobbles from a stone wall, passing them into the house for us to use as weapons in the hand-to-hand fighting.

And though it seemed like ten minutes that we fought in this manner, buying time for our own second wave to reload, it was probably no more than thirty seconds before a hundred of our rifles were answering again, and then a hundred more; and once again, the Mexicans sounded a retreat. Our position was unassailable.

In the silence following their retreat, there was at first only the sound of the injured and the dying, groaning and calling out for help, in the streets of Mier as well as within our own ranks, and the whinnying of injured horses.

We heard a new sound, then, coming from the buildings across the street—a sound like a rushing creek coming from the waterspouts that lined the buildings of commerce. As the rain had stopped, we did not think it was the sound of runoff and feared instead that it might be coal oil—that they were planning to try to smoke or burn us out.

It was almost first light. In the recovery period for the opposing armies, the regrouping and strategizing, we listened to that newer rushing water sound, and as the gray light of day revealed to us the carnage, we saw, beyond the hundreds of dead Mexicans and the scores of dead horses, that the waterspouts were running red with the blood of all the snipers we had killed atop those buildings. The red rivers of their passing were pouring out onto the cobblestones of the street, and the village dogs, gaunt as skeletons, were tottering among the dead and dying, lapping at the pools and puddles of blood between the cobblestones and drinking straight from the fountain of the drain spouts, their muzzles and whiskers red-splashed.

Now