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

bean, unfolding from beneath the soil, could shove aside a stone; and of the way a handful of such seeds could transform a barren land into a crop of bounty—and such dreams, such images, gave me strength, without my yet having to put a single bean into my mouth, even as other men around me were stumbling, falling to their knees.

Sometimes when this happened a soldier would circle back around on his horse and dismount and offer a hand to the fallen captive to help him back to his feet, offering him a sip of water from his canteen; though other times, the circling-back captor would instead give the supplicant a lashing across his neck and back. Gradually we came to understand dimly that our captors’ wrath was most likely to be highest when the distances between one village and the next were greatest, and we tried to adjust our collapses accordingly. We helped each other along as we could, and tried to maintain a steady pace.

So festive was the celebration of our arrival in Matamoros that we stayed for two nights rather than one, and Green and Fisher were allowed a new set of clothes and were boarded in a lieutenant’s home, and I began to understand that the more powerful our leaders could be made to appear, the greater the cause for celebration, and the greater the reflected glory cast upon the conquerors.

The extra night’s rest, even though we were housed in a cow pen, was blissful. Three more of our number had died from consumption—we had stopped and buried them along the trail—and had we not gotten the extra night’s rest in Matamoros, I believe that we would have lost a dozen more. Among us, only Wallace and Cameron seemed impervious to fatigue and unable to acknowledge defeat.

In the evenings I played cards with boys like Orlando Phelps and Billy Walker. We played not in the reckless style of young men but cautiously now, like old men; though our greatest bluff was the game itself, and the casual pretense that all those among us who played would still be with us at journey’s end. That our path would somehow lead us back home—or anywhere else, for that matter, other than the abyss.

In Monterrey, our officers stayed once again in a private home. We were in the city for a week and never saw them once during that entire time. It was almost too much for men like Cameron and Wallace to bear, but our jealousy and resentment were tempered by the valuable recuperation time we were gathering.

Captains Green and Fisher boarded in a colonel’s house on a bluff overlooking the city. They had been outfitted in more new clothes, grander than ever, which they now wore on the march ever south. And without meaning to gloat—indeed, expressing marvel and amazement at their fortune, rather than triumph—they allowed how they had been entertained on both the piano and the guitar by the colonel’s daughters, whom they had found, in Captain Green’s words, “attractive and compelling, altogether satisfactory.”

They had danced and gone to lavish dinners every evening, being entertained by the city’s elite, who were curious and anxious to witness firsthand this sampling of the barbaric Texas rebels they had been hearing about. Captain Green described the Mexican women he encountered during this strange week as “winged creatures” and said that they danced “with a bewitching, ethereal, gossamer touch.”

They discovered we were bound for the prison at Hacienda del Salado. Green and Fisher said that some of the women with whom they had danced had blanched on hearing that it was our destination and had informed them that it was one of the worst prisons in Mexico, one from which few ever exited alive. It was finally this knowledge more than anything else that emboldened us to make our first attempt at escape.

In the evenings, as we talked about our escape a consensus began to develop, which was that it would be best to make our break from a town or village rather than out in the middle of the desert. A town or village, while possibly offering more resistance, might also yield more loot.

But we still argued when would be the best time to make our rush. Many believed that it should be under cover of darkness, though Bigfoot Wallace, crafty as ever, postulated that morning might be best. He had noticed that the Mexican soldiers each slept with their firearms, but that at breakfast they stacked them in a neat pile while they stood in line to get their grub. He had noted also that the Mexican officers, who were allowed to dine first, had been in the habit recently of going off into the countryside shortly after breakfast for a morning ride with Green and Fisher.

Wallace and Cameron told us to be ever vigilant, particularly in the mornings, that we would recognize the moment when it arrived, that we would know in an instant that it was our time to rise.

We could each feel it building. Our guards seemed jumpy and were quieter than usual. And with this new tension, this new silence, there were now those among us who were beginning to falter at the thought.

Wallace had an eye for these falterers and spent time with each of them, counseling that they would be better off participating in the escape, for if we failed, we all failed together, but if Wallace and Cameron and their followers succeeded, the wrath of the Mexican army would be visited upon those who remained.

Old Archibald Fitzgerald, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who had signed up as much out of boredom as patriotism, was ambivalent, hoping that his status as a British citizen might gain him some kinder treatment, or even release. Another prisoner, Richard Brenham, was far more upset—inconsolable, truthfully. He confided to anyone who would listen that he had been haunted lately by an inescapable premonition that his career was “shortly to be closed,”