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

came to a village, our procession halted at the nearest creek and the Mexicans bathed, polished their boots and brass until they shone, and groomed their horses. They slicked back their dark hair and, reassembling in precise military order, proceeded into the village, with the band marching alongside us, blaring. We were paraded around the town square while the villagers cheered.

In each new village there would be bright decorations, as if for a feast, with colorful ribbons and articles of clothing hanging from Maypoles and strung on clotheslines stretched across the streets and between buildings: scarves, rebozos, serapes, dresses, men’s sequined pants. Paper banners with the slogans of ETERNAL HONOR AND IMMORTAL AMPUDIA and GLORIA Y GRATITUDE AL BRAVO CANALES were everywhere. Church bells pealed and clanged as we were marched around and around the town square, no longer warriors but objects of derision and entertainment. Children danced among us, shaking gourds and rattles made from bones of indeterminate origin. In Nueva Reynosa, an old Indian ran up to us, flashing a mirror in our faces.

In other villages—perhaps towns that had produced some of the soldiers who had been killed in the battle for Mier—there was no celebrating, but instead we were pelted with stones and rotten eggs and called hard names. We were deprived of food and water in these towns, or given the murkiest, brownest, saltiest water imaginable, so that sometimes my own dreams were no longer of escape but instead of pure, clean water, even a single cup of it. All that I now desired I had once possessed.

We soon realized that despite the rigors of the journey, the forced marches through the countryside were infinitely preferable to staying overnight in the villages. In the desert, the camaraderie between us and our captors usually returned, and we preferred the open air of the wilderness to the humiliations of town.

“While marching,” Bigfoot Wallace said, “we can at any rate breathe the pure, fresh air of heaven without being hooted at and reviled by the mob and rabble that always collects around us wherever we halt.”

At the feasts that celebrated our captivity we were given only beans, and never quite enough. We had been given old coats to replace the thin tatters in which we’d previously been shrouded—our “uniforms”—and I would try to save a few dry beans each day from the bag that was offered to us for cooking—slipping a fistful of them, dry and rattling, into my coat pocket before the bulk of the bag was poured into the group caldron. On the next day’s march I would finger them in my coat pocket, examining each one like a talisman before choosing one to place in my mouth.

I would suck on the hard bean, making it last as long as I could, the bean providing some moisture as I salivated, and, later, when it was finally softened enough to chew, a trace of nourishment, giving enough energy for another ten paces, or another hundred.

We pushed on, southward.

We thought about escape all the time. Bigfoot Wallace and Ewen Cameron thought about it most insistently.

Although the officers realized that Wallace was an excellent soldier, they did not know of his fame among the Texas Rangers. They were familiar with Cameron, however. Back when Canales had been a mercenary in the Texas Revolution, fighting on our side for a while, Canales and Cameron had fought nearly to the death in an argument over which one of them would get to ride a certain horse. It looked for now as if Canales the Decapitator had won that argument, and as he rode alongside Cameron—the Scot, walking, nearly as tall as the horse was at the shoulders—it was evident that Canales found great mirth in the present situation, and just as evident that Cameron was simmering.

Each night in our prison camp inside the corral, Wallace—who more and more was becoming our de facto leader—had to counsel restraint. Escape was the unspoken catechism in everyone’s mind—it had become our identity, our reason for being—but each night Wallace reminded us to bide our time and to wait for the single best chance, that we would have only one opportunity, and that we would need to be ready, eternally ready, to make the most of it.

Our old captains had all but deserted us. They had ceased their day-and-night squabbling—having nothing left, finally, to argue about—and for the most part kept to themselves down at one end of the corral. Because they were officers, they were afforded more respect by our captors—sometimes, in the evenings, they would even be given a cigar to smoke. Green still occasionally made an effort to stay connected to his former command, and while Fisher was interested only in his own survival, the fires of escape and revolution still burned bright in Green’s eyes, or so it seemed at night, when he would come over to our low fire to visit. He would sit next to Wallace and appeared to mind neither the unspoken weakening of his own rank nor the unofficial rise of Wallace’s. He seemed like one of us, just a man who had made a poor choice.

In the daytime, however, Green drifted back into conversation with Fisher, and then the two men and their different desires were combined once more, incompatible but as inseparable as they had been at the beginning of the journey. Sometimes, believing it unfit for officers of any kind to be made to march so far, Canales and Ampudia would allow Fisher and Green to ride with them—though always Ampudia kept Fisher separated from Shepherd, whose black hair was getting longer, and whose already olive skin was growing even darker.

And in the daytime, trudging through my comrades’ dust, dreaming of water, I would grip the fistful of beans in my coat pocket, would examine each one in my hand, rolling them between my fingers like pebbles. I would think of the incredible power latent in each seed—of the way a single