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

the desert below, and could see where many of the men had tossed their threadbare blankets on top of scrub brush to make crude tents, and then crawled beneath them to die. Others scratched at the thin soil with their fingernails, digging as if searching for buried treasure; but we saw then, as they wallowed in that freshly dug depression, that they were simply trying to use that brief coolness of the newly exposed soil to take some of the radiant heat from their fevered, baking bodies.

They appeared to be eating the cool dirt they had just dug, applying it to their cracked and blistered mouths. They drank their own urine.

There were others strung out all over the mountainside and crawling around in the valleys. The mountain was bleeding men. I don’t know why we stayed on top. Cameron and Wallace appeared confused, directionless, almost lifeless. I tried to formulate a plan, tried to dream an idea, a strategy, anything that might give us hope, no matter how improbable, but could think of nothing, could instead only desire, like the others, water. Even a single jar would have been enough, even a single swallow.

Looking back at the trail of our misery, we could see rafts of vultures, looking like columns of black smoke, circling the ruin of horses and mules several miles distant. Anyone could look up at the mountain and see where we had been and where we were going.

Indeed, it turned out, entire villages had been observing the stupor of our progress and our descent. Barragan’s men, now well rested, well watered, well armed, had ridden around to the north, knowing that that was where the mountain would spit us out. They were waiting patiently there, at the mouth of the Cañon de San Marcos, where they began snaring Texans one by one and two by two, like fish in a weir.

We who were left remained far atop the mountain, watching the soldiers below, still waiting for us. Our upper group had dwindled from seventy to twenty. We had no water, no food, no weapons, and it was not going to rain; neither did it seem that any divine intervention was going to reach us. Charles McLaughlin had stopped sketching and instead sat numbly, staring, as we all were, at the smoke from the soldiers’ fires far below.

There was nothing to do but surrender, no other alternative in the world if we were to have another chance at life, yet Wallace and Cameron seemed unable to discuss this fact, and I saw that it was up to me to broach the subject, that it was my responsibility to try to save myself, as well as the tatter of men scattered around me.

I fingered the beans in my pocket. The men were dying, boiling on the rocks, desiccating like withered salamanders; I was not sure they had the strength to descend, even if they could be persuaded.

“If we are to have any hope of fighting again,” I said, “we must survive.” My voice was a croak, and I could see now that many of the men did not even understand what I was talking about; that although they had seen the activity below and witnessed the smoke rising from the soldiers’ cooking fires, their minds were no longer making even the simplest of connections. Issues such as freedom or captivity no longer existed for them. There was just one thing in the world: the next rattling breath, followed by another, followed by another.

Cameron bowed his chin to his chest, then shook his head slowly. Wallace reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, then rose and went around to each of the fallen men, touching them lightly, and one by one, we rose, all except Cameron, and proceeded down the mountain, limping and wobbling, toward the smoke. When I paused to look back, I saw that Cameron had finally risen and was following, and although he was bullheaded and often violent beyond reason, I felt a wave of guilt at being responsible, even partially, for the surrender of so uncompromising a man.

Skeletons already, we stumbled down the mountain, falling often and helping each other up, making our way toward the distant threads of smoke. When we arrived in the camp and saw the too familiar sight of our comrades housed once again in makeshift corrals, we were rewarded for our surrender with a few sips of water. Colonel Barragan escorted Wallace and Cameron away from the rest of the skeletons and placed them in their own separate corral.

From time to time we would look across at them, peering through our rails to where the two big men sat hunch-shouldered and conversing, and as we recovered and felt the flow of life returning to us, many of the men allowed that they felt awful and lamented that they had not stayed on the main road all the way home, as the Englishman had advised.

For the next few days, Barragan’s cavalry scoured the countryside, bringing in stragglers. The Mexicans had gathered several wild longhorns, and they slaughtered some of these and fed us. After we had eaten the meat, the soldiers then prepared us for another march by binding our wrists and ankles with strips of damp hide cut from the same cattle. The intestines of the slaughtered animals were turned inside out and given to us to use for water vessels. We filled them and hung them around our necks, and as we resumed our marching, southward again toward that coppery sun, the sloshing of the water in those intestines made the same sound it must have made in the cattle, back when they had still been living.

And still our numbers kept diminishing. Two of our men, Priest Gibbons and Crandall Nash, crawled out from beneath the corral one night, sneaked into the water reserves, and drank all they could hold, and then died in agony a few hours later, their systems shocked into exploding.

The soldiers marched