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

working ourselves to death, which was certainly not the way we had envisioned achieving our glory when we had first set out: death by washerwoman scrubbing, death by adobe digging.

We began by clearing out the old rubble, forming an assembly line and passing out fragment after fragment, like a bucket brigade—Texans, Mexican soldiers, and townpeople alike. Night had fallen and a low full moon was rising, dropping the temperature precipitously, freezing the wet cobblestones with a glistening skin of ice. We made bonfires of the ruined rafters and chairs and tables, fires so large that they cast heat upon us even from a great distance, the glimmering of the flames reflecting in each icy cobblestone and in the dark eyes of the villagers and the soldiers; and as we worked in that unbroken chain, there was again a strange solidarity that began to be knit among us, captors and captives and townspeople alike.

By morning, we had each of the residences cleaned out completely, and, wobbling with fatigue, dug new pits in which we formed the adobe mixture. Our grimy rags of clothes were crusted with our own blood and the grit of the adobe mixture, and some of the townspeople had found coats for us to wear, and crude gloves.

We worked as we could, sometimes pausing to lie down in the street or next to the adobe pit to pass into a brief unconsciousness of sleep for two or three glorious minutes, before rousing to rejoin our fellow laborers.

The boy who had gotten gangrene in his knee from the cactus needle, Joseph Berry, was working with us, though fading fast. During the battle he had been shot in his good knee as well, so that he was unable to stand without crutches, and we could each smell on him the same telltale odor of rot and loss that had been on Shepherd. But Joseph Berry was even more insistent that he be allowed to keep both legs, regardless of the consequences, and Dr. Sinnickson, beaten down by our travails, did not have the energy to argue with him much. Neither was Captain Green or Fisher inclined to order the legs’ removal, figuring that we were all short for this world anyway.

The odor, however, was horrific, and I had the thought that had he been more comely, like Shepherd, rather than as scraggly and scruffy as he was, the doctor and the officers might have worked harder to save him. As it was, he died on the fifth day—in his last hours, he changed his mind and asked Sinnickson to remove the legs, though by that time he was too far gone and we had begun digging his grave even before he passed. We had him buried by that evening, still more bloody and fevered seed for that contested soil.

It took us all that night and the next day and night to finish—Texans and Mexicans alike, working shoulder to shoulder, past the point of exhaustion; but when we were finished, the rebuilt city sparkled, the still damp stucco gleamed like gold, and the hands of destroyers and avengers had been turned instead into those of creators.

We accomplished more in those last two days than we had all autumn, and a greater solidarity had grown between us, captives and captors, for when men have worked together in hard physical labor toward a shared and common goal, their differences and even ancient enmities can be bridged in a way like no other.

We left Ciudad Mier on the seventh day following our surrender, marching in a long, filthy line southward, and attended on every side by the horsebound filade of the victors, the successful defenders of their homeland. And in this manner, I suppose, we were getting what we had desired all along—marching ever southward, as if still on some larger mission: one that we had thought we had understood but of which we were now beginning, in our fatigue and humbling defeat, to realize we had no inkling. That there was a larger mission, a destiny fuller and more powerful than even the one of our own imaginings.

4

Escape

THEY KEPT US in a crude cedar-split corral each night, with a cannon guarding the gate, so that should we try a mass escape, they could level us all. We were kept separate from the horses but afforded the same treatment; we had a communal trough from which to water, were made to void along the perimeter of the corral, and were given but one shovel with which to fling the offending spoor as far from the crude corral as possible.

The nights were bitterly cold, the stars harder and fiercer out in the desert than they had been in the soft hills of home. For warmth we had to build a fire in the center of the corral and then scrape away the coals and sleep bunched up together in the warm ashes. Each morning when we awoke, we looked like ghosts.

We arose at daylight, were given a breakfast of boiled beans, and resumed our march, not even bothering to extinguish our cooking fires, for there was little left in that desolate country to burn. All we possessed were the tattered clothes on our backs, and it was difficult to walk in our riding boots. The cobblers’ nails began to protrude into our heels, so we cushioned the boots with cactus pads and short grass; when the country permitted it, we marched barefoot, carrying our ragged boots in our arms.

Shepherd rode with General Ampudia, always looking forward at his new countryside, never back.

Canales’s infantry and Ampudia’s cavalry kept us surrounded constantly, and from somewhere a military band had joined us, sometimes marching silently beside us, carrying their bright, brassy instruments large and small, and other times playing them loudly. We marched on blindly, unmindful of where we were going or of what fate awaited us, pale prisoners in an alien land, advancing across the desert like a gaudy and inept circus.

Whenever we