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

perceived to be his cowardice. At any time, Ampudia and Canales could have stormed us, could have peeled loose a couple hundred men and overwhelmed us, but the Mexicans chose instead to wait, chose not to spend any more of their lives or resources in that ten-to-one barter that we had inflicted so far. Green cursed violently and then spat and announced, “Boys, I think we are going to have to cross over.”

He looked over at me for a second, then shook his head—it was Fisher’s fault; if only Fisher had remained, we might have been able to make a stand—and with a sadness I have rarely seen in a man, Green nodded to Simmons to prepare and then hoist a white flag; and as it was lifted, the throng of the Mexican army gave a great cheer of victory and came hurrying across the street to “capture” us.

Before they reached us, Green, rather than allowing our, captors to take his rifle from him, began smashing it to pieces with one of the same bloodstained cobbles he had used earlier in the night to crush the head of a Mexican soldier.

Bigfoot Wallace said nothing, though his eyes filled with water. Later in his journal, he would write of the incident: “Never shall I forget the humiliation of my feelings when we were stripped of all our arms and equipment, and led off ignominiously by a guard of swarthy, bandy-legged, contemptible greasers. Delivered over to the tender mercies of these pumpkin-colored Philistines, I could have cried, if I hadn’t been so mad.”

Even then, not everyone crossed over with us. Whitfield Chalk and Caleb St. Clair, both ministers, had been among those most fiercely committed to standing their ground and fighting—due perhaps to previous arrangements they believed they had made with their Maker—and as the Mexicans hurried across the street to take charge of our surrender, tripping and stumbling over the bodies of their own fallen, Chalk and St. Clair climbed into one of the giant baking ovens in the home in which we were hiding. They would make it out alive, I was to find out much later, waiting until nightfall before slipping out of town and crossing the river, making it all the way back to Texas, where they told President Sam Houston of the heroic events at Ciudad Mier, and of the brave manner in which they had fought their way free of the besiegement.

This was nearly fifty years ago. Once I was able to finally make it back home, for the next five decades I planted crops, season after season, and harvested them, year after year, with very little if anything changing in my fields, even as the world around me changed, or seemed to change.

All wars, like all crops, are the same in that the secret story housed within each seed is undeniable, and that they will always play themselves out in the same manner, again and again, season after season. That belief—that knowledge—is both a terror and an assurance. Terrible, because the content of that seed lies within the hearts of all men, and yet assuring, too, in that we can do little if anything to change it.

They kept us under house arrest for a week while we buried the dead, ours and theirs. Woll and Santa Anna never appeared—perhaps having been informed it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they had never been coming in the first place—and some of Ampudia’s and Canales’s men guarded us as we worked, while others helped us with the burials.

We carried the dead Texans in carts and on our shoulders to a field outside of town, where we carved their names on hastily lashed crosses, prefacing their last names with only one initial to save time; and we buried the Mexipan soldiers in a field at the top of a bluff at the other end of town, laying them down in precise and geometric military fashion.

The digging was easy in the soft sand, and the cold weather was in our favor, as was the dampness of the earth. We were each responsible for burying sixteen soldiers a day—a soldier every hour—and by the middle of the third day we had the task completed, nearly fifteen hundred men buried.

As we worked side by side with our captors and our enemies, a rapport soon developed; and while I would certainly never call it friendship or even affection, there was a kind of respect and peacefulness that accrued as the residue of those labors; and we all took pride, at the end of each day, in the comfort of a difficult job done well.

Early into our work, General Ampudia himself had ridden among us, observing not just the progress of our labors but the features of the men we were burying, as if to memorize them for the inevitable day when their families and loved ones asked for an accounting. He carried a small ledger in his saddlebags, in which he occasionally entered a few phrases and what looked like brief sketches of the men.

General Ampudia had also taken note of the singular sight of Shepherd struggling to excavate his share of the graves—able to plunge the shovel into the loose soil with one hand, but having great difficulty then in lifting the sand out. The deeper Shepherd got, the more sand slid back off his shovel and down the hills of sand surrounding him, so that at times it seemed he was attempting to bury himself rather than any of the fallen enemy. By early afternoon of that first day, Ampudia had ordered one of his lieutenants to give Shepherd a hand up out of his hole, stating that he was a man of mercy and that since clearly we Texans had corrupted a young boy who was not yet old enough to make decisions on his own, he was going to take the boy under his wing.

Fisher protested, climbing out of his hole and laying a hand on