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

dream he was back at his home in Brazoria County, where there was a great feast in his honor, with friends and family, but he kept pushing all the wonderful food aside.

“I craved water, only water,” he said, “and when this was forthcoming I emptied each jar as it was brought to me and then called for more.” He shook his head slowly, exhibiting the same torpor that had afflicted Bigfoot Wallace. “Each draught seemed only to inflame my thirst, and yet no one of the vast company present seemed astonished at the amount of water I drank. My thirst was unquenchable.”

We all felt a great envy that he had received such offering, even if only in a dream, and I felt a great loneliness, that I had been sleeping near him but had received no such dream, that it had passed over me and chosen him.

And when he, too, split off from our larger group, choosing instead to try to crawl back down off the mountain, no one tried to discourage him, and an older man, an ex-officer from Zachary Taylor’s campaign in New Mexico, Major George Oldham, joined him, as did a few others. We watched as they crawled away across the high desert like animals, disappearing over the rim of the mountain, looking like a line of slow-moving bears: disappearing, bound for the salt-desert below.

They found water. Gnawing again at the roots and eating even the thin, salty soil itself, they had continued descending until they stumbled finally onto a waterfall gushing straight out of the mountain.

There was no prefatory seep or spring above it, but simply a great cannonade of water jetting from a port, a rift in the mountains, and splattering onto the rocks below, in which, over the centuries or millennia, the water had carved a wide and deep pool before trailing away back down the mountainside, running as a small creek for a while and then disappearing back into the soil.

It had been running just a thousand feet below us all along.

John Alexander and his group spent the rest of the day lying in that pool, bathing and drinking and eating the last of the now rotten horse meat one of them had stashed in his pack. It was not the feast of his dream of the night before, he told them: it was better.

In the meantime—never dreaming of Alexander’s success (neither did we see the smoke from their cooking fires), we staggered north, still clinging to the mountain’s spine, unwilling to give up any of our hard-earned vantage. Two more of our number—Buster Toops and O. M. Martin—drifted off and never returned. They, unlike so many dozens of others, did survive, and upon their return to Texas their accounts were well publicized, recorded into the strange vault of written and remembered history, while the exploits, the failures and successes, of so many others vanished unknown or were never told.

Toops and Martin licked rainwater from little depressions in the scooped shallows of rocks over on the shadier north side of the mountain, when they could find them. They would hike until they collapsed into sleep, then awaken and hike, again for days at a time, before collapsing again, until one day they came upon a feral ox.

Martin, unlike almost all the other men, had retained his musket; he killed the animal, and once again they drank its blood, sucking it straight from the wound. When they had gotten out all that they could in that manner, they used the tiny flint from the musket to gut the ox and were finally able to open it enough to be able to extract and roast the liver and a few other organs.

They came eventually into a little valley, where they encountered a few small, remote ranches. Here they were treated with kindness and hospitality, and with their stolen silver they purchased food and supplies and then veered north and east, back toward Laredo, the site of our original plundering.

They reached the river and floated across on a fallen log, shouting and whooping. Their joyous splashing alerted a few townspeople, who, believing themselves to be under attack again, responded with a volley of gunfire that successfully steered Toops and Martin away from town and back into the brush. But it was native brush, and native soil, and they staggered on with great joy to San Antonio, where their selective tale was received with awe.

John Alexander and Major Oldham’s waterfall groip had continued on, falling apart in the meantime, dwindling and scattering, lost and dying in the desert until finally only Alexander and Oldham remained. Oldham found a beehive and was mauled by the bees when he tried to scoop the honey out with his bayonet—they followed him on a dead run for two miles before he collapsed, unable to go any farther, and was very nearly stung to death. He was ill for several days—Alexander stayed with him and cared for him—and no sooner had they started moving again than Alexander fell ill, wracked by fever, and Oldham stayed and cared for him.

When they finally reached the Rio Grande, they dismantled an old stock pen, built a pole raft, and floated across in moonlight, back to the freedom of the Republic of Texas, although not yet back to safety.

The village of Laredo had, via Toops and Martin’s accounts in San Antonio, received word of the expedition’s escape and had posted lookouts. Alexander and Oldham had to skirt the town and hide in the brush to avoid capture by the local militia. It took them another month to reach San Antonio, where they too were received as heroes.

Still others split off from Cameron and Wallace’s group. They struck out on their own, descending back into the desert, although they failed to encounter the waterfall that Alexander and Oldham had found.

It was still cool up in the mountains, but out on the desert, the weather had turned warmer. We could see the shimmering heat waves rising from