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

Shepherd’s arm to detain him. But Shepherd only stared back at him—looking at him as if not recognizing him—and after a moment Shepherd pulled his arm away, and Ampudia laughed, and ordered one of his soldiers to dismount and give Shepherd his horse, while Ampudia walked. The soldier did as he was ordered, knelt and clasped his hands together to form a lower stirrup, and helped lift Shepherd onto his new horse. The next time we saw him, Shepherd was cleaned and scrubbed and wearing a Mexican uniform, and he neither looked our way nor avoided us but moved among and past us as if so completely in another world that the rest of us might never have existed for him: as complete an absence in his past now as was even his arm itself.

We had heard from other veterans that with such injuries there were ghost pains that persisted for decades. But if Shepherd ever felt such pain, he gave no sign of it. He appeared not even to acknowledge the arm’s absence, and this gave him a sad kind of grace; and as he moved among us, inspecting our work but never commenting, it seemed that he had buried us, also.

After the burials were completed we began cleaning the streets, scrubbing the blood from the cobblestones. We heated water and lye in iron kettles and cauldrons and scrubbed the stones with fistfuls of river sand until our hands were bleeding. We crawled across the cobbles on our knuckles and knees in the drenching rain that helped wash away the old blood as we scrubbed it free, as well as our own blood.

I have never been colder in my life. We scrubbed until our hands were so numb and torn and wrinkled that we could feel neither the heat nor the lye. As we hauled our iron buckets down the street, steam rose not just from the cauldrons themselves but from our bodies, our sagging, wet clothes draped over us to retain the dwindling heat of our animal bodies, and from the cleansed streets themselves.

Men were hacking and coughing, shivering and chattering. In this endeavor, the Mexican soldiers offered no aid but instead stood guard on the sidewalks, smoking and watching and visiting among themselves, and spelling one another frequently to go warm themselves by the fires within their temporary quarters.

The villagers watched us, too, as did the returning runaway horses, brush-whipped and hungry, saddles sagging sideways from where their cinches had loosened, mouths bloody from where they’d been stepping on their bridles, jerking their heads downward and rattling their teeth. The soldiers led these mounts, Mexican and Texan, into their corrals, and the more feeble among us, the hackers and wheezers, the tubercular rattlers, were assigned the less arduous job of cleaning and currying the remuda for our nearing departure.

We watched for Shepherd, hoping he might be able to inform us of what the Mexicans had in mind for us, and able to intervene somehow on our behalf—but we never saw him, or Ampudia either, and we wondered whether Shepherd had been sent back home.

The rain broke at the end of that fourth day, just as we were finishing cleaning the streets, with a brisk north wind pushing the drizzle southward and a blue sky clearing. The streets steamed in the new sunlight like freshly broken earth, though the cooler temperature of the north wind soon chilled the stones to a gleaming, polished stillness, with the last of the wisps of steam rising in tatters past the tile roofs of the adobe houses.

The city looked gilded, in that new gold late-day winter light, and the Mexican soldiers were still finding a few dead snipers here and there, fallen on those roofs, and in cracks and crevices, and behind chimneys. They were lowering them with ropes from the rooftops, the marksmen stiff as crabs now. And with the light so beautiful and the streets so clean, the town no longer looked so much like a ruin of war, but instead as if it had been a stage for a play; even the dead soldiers being lowered from the roofs, spinning slowly at the ends of their ropes, gave the appearance of actors between scenes.

We had thought that when we finished cleaning their streets we would be allowed to return to our prisoners’ quarters, where we could strip out of our stinking, sodden clothes and attempt to dry them on string and rope hung in crisscross lattice above the one small stove. But no sooner had we stood, groaning and stretching our crooked backs, than Canales came striding out and informed us that we were to begin repairing the damage to the adobe walls.

We were to work through the night, Canales told us, and on through the next day, and the next night—working, he said, until we had all the rubble cleared and every fracture patched, working until it was all as good as new, or better. We were to work ceaselessly, he said, and without food or water, save for whatever bits and pieces the townspeople of the wrecked town and the owners of the homes in which we were laboring chose to dispense to us.

There might have been a revolt right then, even though we had no weapons, but we were too exhausted from the full day of kneeling on the cobbles like penitents; and I think also that the incredible gold light that was pouring into the village was lulling our warrior spirits somehow, almost as if transforming us from rebels and revolutionaries back into the simple yeomen we had once been.

We looked instinctively to our leaders, or to the men who had once been our leaders—the hateful Fisher, with his thumb blown off, and the cocksure, swaggering Green, as well as big Cameron and big Wallace—and when we saw their shoulders slump and saw Green and Fisher turn and begin surveying the damage, we knew that it was possible some of us would end up